Upon launching the game from the Steam launcher, you will be asked to select from one of two options.

“Launch Polybius in Oculus VR Mode” will launch the game directly to your Oculus VR headset. Use an Xbox compatible joypad or the Oculus Touch controllers to play the game.

“Play Polybius” is the option you use to play the game in non-VR mode. Selecting this mode will bring up a further dialogue. Here you will see a list of available screen resolutions and refresh rates – select the one you want to use. Then press “Start Normal” to begin the game. You may also choose to start in VR, just in case you changed your mind between this menu and the last; or to start in 3DTV mode if you have a display that supports such a thing.

You can choose to Configure Keyboard. Here you will see a diagram of a controller (to remind you what goes where) and a bunch of fields containing the keys bound to each of the controller functions. By default, the ones used in Polybius are:

- Arrow keys for motion

- “A” for button A, used to start the game, choose options in the UI, and to fire.

- “B” for button B, used to go BACK in the UI.

- “Q” to quit the current game in progress from a paused state. Right bumper on  the controller.

- “P” for pause, used to toggle Pause Mode on and off, and to go to the UI options menu from the title screen. Menu button on the controller.

You can change these key assignments to whatever you like: select the field with the binding you wish to change. If a key is already bound, press that key to remove it from the binding. If you want to add a key to the binding, press the key to add it. You can bind multiple keys to a single control function if you so desire. When you’re done, press Accept and Exit to save your changed bindings, Cancel to leave without saving or changing the bindings, or Reset to Default if  you’ve really buggered things up.

There are two keys with hardwired functions in the game: ESC quits to desktop, and F1 toggles between fullscreen and windowed modes. You shouldn’t use those for game function bindings. That’d be silly.

At the Game Title screen

From this screen you can choose to set the Game  Type (by pressing LEFT and RIGHT), bring up the UI Options pages (by pressing P/Menu), or to begin a new game by pressing A.

Game Modes

There are three selectable game modes in Polybius. These are:

- Pure Mode. In this mode you always begin at level 1 with 3 shields.

- YOLO Mode. In this mode you begin at level 1 with 9 shields, but you never receive any extra shields.

- Classic Mode. In this mode, you can begin the game on any level that you have previously reached. As you play, each time you begin a new level, your current Lives and Score are compared with your previous best at that level, and saved if they are better. You can subsequently begin a game at that level, and with that saved Lives and Score – your Restart Best.

If a Classic game is started, you will be taken to the Level Select screen to choose your starting level. Here you can press Left and Right to select levels, or Up and Down to move through the selected levels five at a time. Press A to begin your game or B to go back to the title screen.

Polybius Gameplay Overview

Polybius has two main objectives – to go as fast as you can, and to shoot as much stuff as you  can. The faster you are going, the more points you get for things that you shoot.

To shoot, simply hold down button A. Optimal autofire is standard – no adding difficulty by requiring exhausting button-jiggling for our users.

To increase your speed, fly through the gates (which look like pairs of horns, because of course they do). Each time you pass smoothly through a gate your speed will increase. Try not to clatter or outright run into the sides of the gates, or you will lose speed and a shield.

Fly as fast as you dare, but don’t feel obligated to hit every gate. It’s better to miss an acceleration and just keep your existing speed than it is to clatter a gate, get slowed down, and lose a shield.

If you go fast enough you will start to get shock waves that travel down the surface of the level ahead of you. This is cool and good.

Pick up any pills you see; they will do various things that you will like. There are “bad pills”, but these don’t arise until well into the game so don’t worry about them too much.

Gates light up red when you are lined up correctly to pass through them.

Some projectiles, when shot, turn into Booster Rings which are beneficial to you.

After the first ten levels you may encounter gates that lift you up in the air. You can prolong such flight by pressing DOWN whilst in the air.

On Slalom levels, pass each post on the side that the flag points to. Try to just skim each post as you pass for highest bonuses.

Try to learn a comfortable and smooth path through each of the levels. Once you have that, you can think about optimising it for maximal points rinsage.

The game is pretty zoney on a regular  screen (sit close to a large screen in fullscreen mode for maximal immersion) but it’s a whole nother level in VR. Put on that headset if you’ve got it!

Obligatory Beg for Exposure

If you enjoy Polybius, leave us a like and a review, it all helps. I’m fed up of all the scrabbling for attention that one needs to do these days so I’m not going to endlessly go on about it in my social media or anything, but it’d help if you feel like doing it.

The game should work fine on most PC setups, but the PC world is bound within a fractal border of edge cases, and it is possible there may be problems with exotic setups. Try the game, and if it’s not working for you, take the Steam refund option and if you could let us know what went wrong and what kind of setup you have, we’ll aim to fix the issue with a future patch.

Upon launching the game from the Steam launcher, you will be asked to select from one of three options.

“Launch MAv1 in Oculus VR Mode” will launch the game directly to your Oculus VR headset. Use an Xbox compatible joypad or the Oculus Touch controllers to play the game.

“Play Oculus Arcade Mode” launches onto the headset as before, but with the game in Arcade Mode (see below).

“Play MAv1” is the option you use to play the game in non-VR mode. Selecting this mode will bring up a further dialogue. Here you will see a list of available screen resolutions and refresh rates – select the one you want to use. Then press “Start Normal” to begin the game. You may also choose to start in VR, just in case you changed your mind between this menu and the last.

You can choose to Configure Keyboard. Here you will see a diagram of a controller (to remind you what goes where) and a bunch of fields containing the keys bound to each of the controller functions. By default, the ones used in Minotaur Arcade are:

- Arrow keys for motion

- “A” for button A, used to jump in Goatup

-”B” for button B, used in the Game Select screen

- “Y” for button Y, used to toggle Pause Mode on and off, and to return to the Game Select screen from a game’s Attract Mode.

You can change these key assignments to whatever you like: select the field with the binding you wish to change. If a key is already bound, press that key to remove it from the binding. If you want to add a key to the binding, press the key to add it. You can bind multiple keys to a single control function if you so desire. When you’re done, press Accept and Exit to save your changed bindings, Cancel to leave without saving or changing the bindings, or Reset to Default if  you’ve really buggered things up.

There are two keys with hardwired functions in the game: ESC quits to desktop, and F1 toggles between fullscreen and windowed modes. You shouldn’t use those for game function bindings. That’d be silly.

Arcade Mode

You may be wondering what Arcade Mode is, so I’ll explain. In non-arcade mode the game uses online leaderboards, and these behave as they generally do on consoles and in Steam; the name that is posted to the leaderboards is your logged-in Steam name. That’s fine.

However these are by their very nature arcade-style games; sometimes you might be in a situation where you have a bunch of players taking turns to play, and you don’t want to have to have everyone log in and out all the time to post their correct name on the online boards. Not everyone playing may even have a Steam account. For this situation there is Arcade Mode. This mode uses local score tables only, and at the end of a game, if a player gets onto the local score board they will be prompted to input their name, just like on an old arcade machine.

At the Game Select screen

Here you can launch either of the two games in Minotaur Arcade Volume 1. Press A to launch Gridrunner, or press B to launch Goatup.

Each game will launch into its Attract Mode. In the Attract Mode you can:

- Press A to begin playing

- Press Y to return to the Game Select phase

- Press Left or Right to page through the score tables. Note that online score tables may take a little while to propagate.

The games themselves are simple to learn. You will learn the subtleties of gameplay as you gain experience in each one. The basics are as follows:

Gridrunner

Move your ship with the directional controls. Firing is continuous and automatic; there is no need to press any fire button. Imposing game difficulty by requiring frantic button mashing may have been fine for bongoing away on arcade cab buttons but we’ll be having none of it at home.

Collect the big obvious poweruppy things. They do a variety of nice things that you will enjoy while they last. Do collect any minotaurs in nice stripy jumpers that you see.

Try not to run into any of the enemies  or their bullets. If you do you’ll go bang.

Avoid the Bloody Laser Thing. Cultivate an awareness of its position and cadence.

When your ship is drawn as an outline, you are invincible. Use this time productively to smash enemies by collision like an angry bull, or to nip out of scrapes.

Gridrunner Game Modes

There are three selectable game modes in Gridrunner. These are:

- Pure Mode. In this mode you always begin at level 1 with 3 lives.

- Endurance Mode. In this mode you begin at level 1, but you never receive any extra lives.

- Casual Mode. In this mode, you can begin the game on any level that you have previously reached. As you play, each time you begin a new level, your current Lives and Score are compared with your previous best at that level, and saved if they are better. You can subsequently begin a game at that level, and with that saved Lives and Score – your Restart Best.

You may select between the game modes at the Level Select screen before gameplay begins. Note that levels may only be selected – by pressing Left and Right - if you are not in Endurance Mode.  Pressing Down toggles Endurance Mode on and off.

Mouse Control

It is possible to use the mouse to control the ship in Gridrunner. This will only work in Non-VR, Full Screen mode.

Goatup

Climb as high as you can. Do not fall off the bottom of the tower.

Kiss any billy goats you see on the way.

Traverse platforms and collect objects to progress your pregnancy.

Try to raise as large a family as possible.

Some items grant special abilities for a period of time.

When your goat is drawn as an outline, you are invincible. Use this time productively to smash enemies by collision like an angry bull, or to nip out of scrapes.

If you enjoy Minotaur Arcade Vol. 1, leave us a like and a review, it all helps. I’m fed up of all the scrabbling for attention that one needs to do these days so I’m not going to endlessly go on about it in my social media or anything, but it’d help if you feel like doing it.

The game should work fine on most PC setups, but the PC world is bound within a fractal border of edge cases, and it is possible there may be problems with exotic setups. Try the game, and if it’s not working for you, take the Steam refund option and if you could let us know what went wrong and what kind of setup you have, we’ll aim to fix the issue with a future patch.

Just in case anyone is wondering what Minotaur Arcade is and how it relates to the old Minotaur Project mobile phone games, well, I shall explain.

The Minotaur Project games were a series of 9 games I did during the two awful years I worked on mobile phone games. Although those two years ended up being the worst of my entire career, the games themselves werre actually pretty decent little things, and garnered good reviews wherever such things were published. Over time the games became nonviable on iOS as Apple decided that nobody would be able to run older games on newer versions of their OS, and we had neither the hardware nor the inclination to invest any more time in updating them, and anyway I had no intent of going back to mobile at all any time soon unless someone was to pay me handsomely in advance to do so. Just too horrible of a market.

Some of the games were ported to Android, and indeed free versions of those are available elsewhere on this site. But basically those games were languishing and pretty much unavailable to most people.

At the beginning of the year Giles was working on the Tempest ports, and I was in need of something to do myself, and I thought it might be nice to somehow maybe resurrect some of those old mobile games, rescue them and bring them to actually viable platforms. Of course I didn’t think that just straight porting them over would cut the mustard; I’d have to be able to make them more interesting in some way and polish up and extend them.

One of my favourites of the old Minotaur games was Gridrunner, which I’d developed in the style of a classic old Namco arcade machine.

Now most old arcade machines were sprite and tile based, and so was a lot of the old Minotaur Project stuff, so I started thinking about how I might go about creating some kind of framework into which it would be easy to port sprite and tile based stuff, making it easy for me to plug the old MP designs into it, whilst also allowing for the possibility of introducing new features with which to extend the designs once ported, and to make them look nicer and more interesting than just straight mobile phone game ports.

I thought it’d even be nice if I could make it so everything could be playable and look cool in VR as well as on a normal monitor, since by now we have a fair bit of VR experience and the necessary bits in our engine, so why not?

And so the framework for Minotaur Arcade was made – a ‘virtual arcade game’ environment designed to be easy to port MP games into (and therefore by their very nature *any* sprite and tile based games also), which would allow me to get ports up and running relatively quickly, then allow me to add extra stuff to make them more interesting and fun. And have playable VR versions fall out by default too.

I don’t have that many screenshots of the actual porting process unfortunately but there are a few taken during porting of Goatup so you can see something of how it works.

Here’s Goatup on iOS. It’s a platform game where you have to climb up as high as possible while eating grass, grabbing bonuses and having kids. As you can see it’s not particularly complicated; there’s a bit of an effect to make it look like it’s mapped onto a section of a cylinder but it’s really pretty minimal, you can barely notice it in the screenshot.

And here we are at the start of the porting. The sprites and tiles have been recreated in a voxel editor, as everything on the “virtual arcade game” screen is a voxel object. To the code we’re porting our environment just looks like a char map and some sprites though, so it’s easy to quickly start getting bits of the game logic ported and working even if they don’t look that nice yet. You can see the platform generation is working and the central column is sort of being drawn even though it looks a bit odd. The Spectrum-style score display of the original is now replaced by our Namco-coinop-style status area at the top.

A bit further on. The “screen” doesn’t have to be flat any more since it’s a 3D object in its own right, so instead of simulating the game being drawn on a section of a cylinder, we can simply actually make it so. It’s looking a bit sparse and odd here but you can see that major bits of the game are actually starting to work and become playable. The goat is running around eating grass and leading kids around already.

And here the basic port is nearly complete. There’s still a few inconsistencies (like it saying ‘lives’ in the top right instead of ‘kids’), but it’s pretty much all working. It looks more interesting than the old mobile versions, it’s fully playable in VR as well, but as far as the game logic is concerned it’s just running on a stock sprite and tile system. It means we can get a nice looking port done really quickly.

Once done we can polish up the game and add extras as necessary. The end results look pretty nice compared to the original starting point.

Original iOS game

Similar scene in Minotaur Arcade framework

MAv1 Goatup general gameplay

Of course we would like to be able to sell these games, and hopefully to be able to do so at a reasonable price, as we’ve learned through bitter experience that the ‘race to the bottom’ pricing of games on mobile led to them becoming devalued to the point where charging over a pound was considered to be “expensive” and it’s now at a point where people on mobile simply expect games to be free and developers have to resort to trickery like serving adverts or designing games that funnel users through IAP pay bottlenecks as part of their core design. This is not something I am willing to resort to.

Ideally we’d like to charge perhaps a bit over a fiver for MA releases. I do appreciate that some people might think that a little cheeky for enhanced mobile phone game ports even if they are quite significantly enhanced (but I would argue less cheeky than selling emulator roms of old games for that kind of price, which seems to happen a lot on various platforms these days). So I figured to make the perceived value better it might be nice to organise the MA releases as pairs of games – hence the “Volume 1″. I figure two decent games, including VR versions, for a bit over a fiver isn’t that bad of a deal.

The other game of the first pair is Gridrunner, as you have no doubt figured out by now. Here are some screenshots of what it looked like on iOS, and what it looks like inside the Minotaur Arcade environment.

Gridrunner on iOS.

Gridrunner ported to Minotaur Arcade. Here is the title screen of the attract mode.

Gameplay from an early level.

Logically the game thinks it’s on a flat tile map. We can use the Minotaur Arcade framework to warp it onto a hemisphere though, so why not.

The display of the “virtual arcade machine” isn’t constrained to the tilemap surface, so explosions can happen in 3D space. Something you will appreciate even more if you put on a VR headset and get inside the display!

Different levels can offer different perspectives and topographies.

And of course it wouldn’t be a Llamasoft game without going a bit mental with the voxelshatter stuff at times (usually at times when you are not directly controlling the action, as here, where you are busy exploding)

and here, where you’ve just completed a level, so we can go a bit bananas with the voxelshatter and postprocessing effects just to punctuate that pleasurable moment of completion.

The games come with all the usual Llamasoft modes you’ve come to expect – Gridrunner has Pure, Endurance and classic Restart Best modes, for example, with online and local score tables for each. The games now also have a new mode called Arcade Mode. This only affects the score table behaviour. Basically on completion of a game, instead of entering your login name automatically as would normally happen, in Arcade Mode when you get a hiscore it brings up an oldschool arcade-style name entry board into which you can enter whatever you like. This entry is then saved on the local (but not online) score table. You might find this mode handy if you have a bunch of mates round, for example, and you want to take turns competing for hiscores, just like in the old arcades, without requiring each participating player to log into Steam or whatever.

Well there you go, that’s what Minotaur Arcade is about. We’ll see how it goes releasing this on ps4 and Steam, and if it goes well enough to warrant it there could be ports to other VR platforms, and further Volumes. It’d be nice if it does do well enough to justify further developments, as I’d enjoy not only porting other Minotaur Project games, but perhaps also doing modern updates of some of my other sprite-and-tile based games (just about anything from the c64 and 16-bit eras would fit well). Or even develop new content for it as well, since I’m not about to just be rehashing old stuff even if I do considerably enhance it.

And it beats selling straight MAME roms for nearly a tenner apiece IMO.

I’ll finish off with a video of MAv1 running on ps4. Look out for it soon, probably on Steam/Oculus first and ps4/psvr subsequently.

Well that took a little longer than expected but Goatup 2 is finally off to Apple. Hopefully it’ll all go well there and if so should be available in about a week. This is the first thing I’ve done that involves having level editing and the ability to share game files, and I know Apple can be a little wary of stuff that does that, but I’m hoping it’ll be fine since I’ve done the filesharing part totally by the book through iTunes, and anyway the game files themselves don’t contain any executable code at all, there just a map of brick and object types and positions.

We’ll see! But anyway soon you’ll be able to finally unleash your inner Matthew Smith!

So what kind of game is Goatup 2?

It’s different from Goatup 1 in that it’s no longer an endless climber. It’s a more conventional platformer, with games consisting of a set of self-contained levels. It’s obviously influenced by games like Manic Miner and Miner 2049er, in that you have to traverse the level collecting keys, which then cause an exit to open, allowing you to leave the level.

It’s nowhere near as demandingly finicky as Manic Miner though. By now I am sure you know that I like my platformers to be very flow-y and sloppy with the emphasis on joyously bouncing around rather than sphincter-clenching over every little jump. So the main difference between this and, say, MM, is that in GU2 there’s no penalty for falling from any height. I’ve always hated that in platform games – fall more than 2 inches, BAM you’re dead. So in GU2, if you can land a jump on a platform, you’ll live. Of course there has to be a platform there – you can still fall out of a level to your doom. And you will, oh yes, you will.

Also unlike in Manic Miner you get to kill your enemies. The same mechanic that allows you to attack enemies also allows you to make midair jumps – and it is the humble fart.

As in Goatup 1, certain objects that you collect trail behind you in a long stream. In Goatup 1 those objects were kids (and you “collected” them by giving birth to them). In Goatup 2 these objects can be kids (which you find on platforms, since you are a billy goat this time around) or other things like level keys, the Queen, or a chicken vindaloo curry.

Each object you collect behind you can be traded for one fart. So if you collect a bunch of objects you can effectively fly, Joust-style, for a while by repeatedly pressing the jump button. Under certain circumstances (having a curry when the Queen is not looking) you can have unlimited farts for a few seconds, during which time you can use your extra mobility to explore otherwise unreachable parts of levels, or to attack clusters of enemies.

Yes, your flatus can be directed at enemies, and in most cases it will knock them off their platforms and out of the game. In all it makes for a game that is like a Bomb Jack-type platformer crossed with a shooter. Crossed with Joust. Kinda. And the shots come out your arse. Which may sound weird but is actually pretty fun.

Of course it is quite possible to make levels with no farting by simply designing them without any fartable objects to collect, so an individual designer may choose to make levels far more tricky and less loose and sloppy than my own. And that’s good .

You can also place The Queen in a level. If The Queen is collected, she starts watching the goat from the side of the level, and of course with Royal eyes upon you you can’t possibly fart. Until you find a curry…

The game ships with 4 default level sets (a level set is referred to as a “game” in the editor) of 20 levels each. Game 1 is a set of levels that start extremely easy to introduce the player to the gameplay. Game 4 is a level set that uses a level template and then varies it by using the various types of bricks, objects and enemies that are available in the level editor. It should serve as a good introduction to the game components for those who want to try making their own levels.

Games 2 and 3 are a collection of levels by me, PVB and Precious Pony. With 80 levels there by default there should be plenty there for people to get stuck into even before they consider using the editor or importing other people’s games.

Game 1 is locked and its levels can’t be edited. This is simply so that we can have online leaderboards that make sense for at least one set of levels. If people could edit those levels they’d change the difficulty and scoring, rendering any leaderboards useless. So the game 1 levels are fixed. There are four leaderboards: Pure (best score in game 1, starting from the beginning); Lifetime (the best score you ever got on each level in Game 1, totalled); Pure Time (fastest time for completing all the levels in Game 1) and Lifetime Time (the sum of all your best ever times on each of the levels in Game 1). So you can play the levels for score, or try and speed run them for time. The two different objectives lead to quite different ways of playing each level, so there’s plenty of scope for replaying, and for either sitting down to do a nice long Pure game or simply dipping in to try to improve one’s score or time on a particular level.

Scores and times are saved locally for the other games too, just not put on a global leaderboard, as that makes no sense for editable level sets.

You can still copy any of the levels out of Game 1 and paste them into another game if you just want to look at how they are made and modify them as you see fit.

Here is a bit of one of the levels in Game 4, showing the use of telephone kiosks, one-way doorways and bulls.

Of course I am hoping that people will start to use the editor and make their own levels too. I thought building an editor would be pretty quick, and yes, it’s not too hard to have something basic up and running in a short while. But making an editor that’s actually stable and suitable for anyone to use is actually a fair old undertaking and it’s taken a while. But in the end I think it’s come out pretty well, and whereas it’ll never be as convenient as something PC-based it actually works nicely, allowing levels to be built easily and tested quickly right on your device. It’s even just about usable on the iPhone, although it’s obviously easier on the iPad. I made all my game levels on an iPad mini, some of them whilst on the toilet. That’ll do for me .

I’ve tried to keep the editor as simple as possible – basically there’s a large area at the top of the screen where you can scroll around the entire tilemap, and a little strip at the bottom where you choose which bricks and objects you want to add to the level. Adding stuff is as simple as drawing it on the screen using your finger. At any time you can press the PLAY button to try out your level.

I’ve made a little guide about how to use the editor. You can view it here, or in-game press the HELP button on the Game Select screen while in Edit mode.

Here’s a couple of videos showing some gameplay and some editor usage that I’ve published before, but which may be interesting if you haven’t seen them yet or just want to get an idea of how the game looks in motion. These are a couple of months old now and some stuff has changed, other stuff has been added, and most things tidied up. But these give a good idea of what the game’s all about.

This shows some GU2 gameplay.

And these two show the editor in use.

The game will be on sale for £2.50 – yes, we’ve decided to move away from the super ultra lowest pricing on the App Store. It’s simply not working out for us to release things at those prices. We’ve done 9 games now so we have a pretty good feel for how things are going and super low prices simply aren’t working for us. We feel that most people who like the work we do wouldn’t begrudge us the price of a pint once every few months, as opposed to the price of a Lion Bar. And as part of our future strategy rather than concentrating on putting out a lot of small iOS games we’re going to aim to do slightly longer projects, on the order of 6 months or so each, and which will be cross-platform on Mac and PC as well as on iOS and Android.

Even so I bet there will still be one or two people who will complain that our games are now “too expensive” at £2.50. But as I said it’s only the price of a pint, and it’s still about one third of what a Llamasoft game cost in 1982!

The upside is that by taking a bit longer to do crossplatform games I should be able to come up with some stuff that’s a bit deeper than most of the iOS work I’ve done, and I think you’ll be quite interested by what I have in mind for my next project. Which will be revealed in due course.

Until then enjoy GoatUp 2 and let’s be seeing some of those user-created levels! I’ll collect up a bunch of my favourites and put them up on the website when there start to be a few around.

As you can see from this, the game this time isn’t continuously scrolling as before. It’s more of a traditional one-screen-per-level platformer (although the “screen” in this case is a large area much bigger than the physical screen, and the view scrolls around as you play).

I want not only to provide players with plenty of platforming fun; I also want them to be able to experience for themselves exactly what it’s like to be Matthew Smith. To that end, although I cannot provide them with any appropriate recreational combustibles, I do provide a level editor with which I hope people will find it easy to experiment and create their own levels. The editor provides a selection of platform game items and an environment in which it’s pretty easy to just “paint” a level using your finger, place items within the level, and try it out instantly by just pressing the PLAY button. There are various different platform types covering most common platformer tropes, collectible items, various bad guys, and “toys” such as the barrel-emitting Kongotaur which can be used to populate your levels.

The platform action itself is kinda Rainbow Islandish, although without the continuous vertical scroll of that game. Collected items follow behind you, and you can trade these items one at a time for a mid-air jump, allowing you to reach otherwise inaccessible places, or to get you out of trouble. Doing such a jump also makes you and any kids you have fart out stars and sparkles, which can be used to knock baddies off platforms. Each kid you collect doubles your bonus multiplier in all items. So there’s a goodly number of ways to complete each level, and you’ll want to go back after initially completing a level to look for ways of completing it with as high a level score as possible, farting away as few bonus items as you can manage.

There’s still a few weeks left in development yet, mainly now just adding more items and toys to the collection, building a good set of default levels, and looking into how we’ll let users share levels they’ve made.

Some people have said they dislike the giant burping noise in the video, and in fact in the final game all you’ll hear for double-jumping is the quiet fart sound effect. The burp was a warning for when your goat was full up from too much grass. It used to be you’d explode if you ate too much, but I took that out, so the burp is now redundant anyway.

Anyway there you go, there’s my master plan to make Matthew Smiths of you all .

Gridrunner is here;

Super Ox Wars is here;

and Five A Day is here.

The games are playable in a window using either keyboard controls or a USB joypad such as the Xbox 360 one (using the appropriate driver). If you are using OS X Lion or later then Lion fullscreen mode is supported along with trackpad control. Users are saying that playing these games in fullscreen with the Magic Trackpad is really excellent, better even than on the iPad.

We did get a bit excited when shortly after release the OS X version of Gridrunner got featured on the front page of New and Noteworthy and for a day or so actually got into the top 10. However at the moment the OS X app store is nothing like as popular as the iOS one, so what would have been a fantastic thing on iOS actually didn’t amount to anything much on OS X. Oh well. Still it was nice to get featured and it can’t hurt to have had a bit of prominence on the OS X app store for a bit.

In other cross platform news, Giles has completed porting our game engine to Android. Here he is showing off Gridrunner on a Nexus 7.

And in the space of a couple of days he also ported Super Ox Wars, Five A Day, Goatup and Caverns of Minos. (That’s the nice thing about our engine, once you get it ported the games just basically fall out quickly. Of course there’s a bit more work to be done on each game before we can release them properly – the Llamasoft online leaderboards have to be set up and coded in, and the games modified so as to be “standard shareware” style, with a truncated “demo” version upgradable to the full version with an IAP. We pretty much need to do it that way on Android, given that it’s such a fragmented market with all kinds of machines with all kinds of different spec out there; we want people to be able to assure themselves that the games run fine on their hardware before they pay anything for the full version).

So there will be a short delay while that stuff gets put into the Android framework, then we’ll be releasing those games in quick order.

And now of course anything new will appear on iOS, Mac OS X and Android more or less simultaneously.

We’re going to be at PLAY Expo in Manchester next weekend, so if you want to check out the Llamasoft games on iOS, OS X or Android we’ll be there with the games on all three platforms for you to play. We’ll also have some old retro machines there for old times’ sake .

It’s that time again!

Another game finished. Super Ox Wars is now available at the App Store!

Click this link to go to Super Ox Wars.

As you probably know sometimes during the Minotaur Project series I like to visit genres that Llamasoft has never tackled before in all the years we’ve been doing games (GoatUp was an example of that being Llamasoft’s first ever attempt at a platform game). So this time I thought it might be nice to tackle a vertically-scrolling shooter, being a popular genre that I’ve never touched before.

My first exposure to vert scrollers was encountering Xevious whilst on holiday many years ago in France. Me and my mates would sometimes escape the heat of the hot summer days by retreating to a nice little arcade full of coinops and pinballs and there they had a Xevious machine into which many a 10 franc coin got lobbed.

Probably my favourite example of the genre was encountered on a different holiday, to the Greek island of Thassos, a few years later. In a beach restaurant there lurked an approachable yet challenging vertically scrolling shooter called Star Force.

This was a somewhat faster paced game than Xevious and featured a small white ship zipping over a tiled surface. Squadrons of enemies would fly down in distinctive formations, larger structures waited to be destroyed on the surface below. Levels were punctuated by larger end-level bosses (which were pretty minimal as bosses go, being just a Greek letter in a square flanked by a couple of turrets) and the difficulty level was just right: challenging without being overwhelming, and with plenty of good long levels to get stuck into. It was a fun blaster, and its basic design informed a lot of other games that came out on various systems. Over the years I’ve enjoyed dipping into these, games like “Astro Warrior” on the Sega Master System:

- a game which displays its Star Force inspiration rather obviously, but which is in fact a much simpler game, having only three levels (although the end level bosses are a bit more complex and aggressive than those of Star Force); and on the Atari ST the little-known gem “Plutos”:

which, despite having a small play area in only a part of the screen, was a rather fun reworking of Star Force which allowed two-player simultaneous gameplay.

Star Force went on to inspire namy more games, some of them semi-official sequels like the Star Soldier series on the PC Engine, which also saw a fair bit of my attention during the time of that excellent system.

In latter years the vert scroller continued to evolve, in particular into the Japanese style now known as “bullet hell”. These games tend to have shorter levels but feature an absolute crapton of enemies and in particular the spectacular geometrical sprays of bullets which give the style its name.

The original Star Force had a much simpler graphical style than the later bullet hell shooters (which often feature some really lovely Japanese spritework and backdrops). And so, in keeping with the spirit of the Minotaur Project games, I thought it’d be nice to pay homage to the old master and do a vert scroller very much in the style of the original Star Force.

Here we are right at the start of Alpha-Area (stage 1). Turrets and targets are scattered on the tile plane below while enemy ships fly in patterns above.

The main part of the game’s design draws its cues directly from Star Force, with crap on the ground to shoot and crap in the air to shoot, much of which shoots back at you.

I needed some kind of theme for the game, and also something to add a bit of a wrinkle to the gameplay, so I turned it into a very mild variation of what is known as a “polarity shooter”, a subgenre of vert-scrollers. In a polarity shooter there are two key colours that can apply to enemies and player alike, and different things happen according to which colour you and the targets are.

A more fierce example of the polarity shooter is “Ikaruga”. Enemies and shots can be either black or white, and you can flip your ship between the two states. Bullets of your own polarity can be absorbed with impunity (and in fact add to your weaponry). Enemies shot with opposite polarity bullets sustain more damage, and choosing to be the right colour at the right time contributes to a chain bonus mechanic.

Now Ikaruga is a fantastic game but it’s really, really difficult, so much so that although I love it I don’t actually find it terribly relaxing to play. It’s one of those games where your sphincter is in an almost constant state of pucker and it’s almost a relief when you get killed because it’s just so tense while you’re playing. I like my games to be a bit more of a romp than that, so for Super Ox Wars I decided to have a simplified version of the polarity thing. Only your ship and weaponry is affected by it and there isn’t any “wrong” polarity that’ll cause you to die if you’re the wrong colour. The polarity affects the gameplay in a more subtle way that I’ll explain as I go along.

But first I have to explain how it became “Super Ox Wars” and how that fits into the design, and to do that we have to take a digression into Amazonian tribal folklore.

A few years ago an idle ox-related Google search led me to a fascinating essay about a little-known cultural event in Brazil called the Amazonian Ox-Dance Festival. (You can read the whole essay here).

Basically, on a small island in the Amazon river, in a town called Parintins, once a year (next weekend, in fact, it being the end of June) two rival teams of dancers meet and compete in a themed dance festival – the “Boi-Bumbá” – in which a tale is told of the death and resurrection of a precious ox.

The ox is the central motif of the tale, and also the identity of each dance team. “Boi Caprichoso” is represented by a black ox with a blue star on his forehead;

and “Boi Garantido” by a white ox with a red heart on his forehead.

(I herd you like Boi Garantido so I put a Boi Garantido on your Boi Garantido)

Over the years both the story and the scale of the festival have evolved. Whereas the original tale of the ox had its origins in stories brought from Europe and Africa, it has now been elaborated to include stories and celebrations of the “caboclo” culture of the people of Parintins, displaying their pride in their multicultural origins and in the unique place in which they live through amazingly elaborate dance routines featuring astonishingly complex and beautiful props, animated characters, costumes and scenery. Each dance troupe is 3,000 people strong.

The tale of the ox ties it all together, and the performance climaxes in a sequence where the beloved ox (the Touro Amado), who was killed by a farmhand desperate to get some meat for his pregnant wife, is resurrected by the tribal shaman, much to everybody’s delight; dancing and partying ensues.

The thing is that this festival is absolutely huge – eclipsed in size only by the infinitely more famous Festival of Rio. Even within Brazil it’s not that well known and you’d be hard pressed to find anybody in Europe who’s even heard of it.

The festival lasts for three days and takes place at the last weekend in June. More than 70,000 people converge on a specially-built arena in Parintins called the “Bumbodromo”, to watch the festivities. Fleets of red and blue boats travel 24 hours down the river from Manaus – Parintins itself not being connected by road – bringing supporters of the rival oxen to the party.

“Bovine matters” are taken very seriously by the supporters, and Parintins itself is divided into areas of red and blue, Garantido and Caprichoso. Wearing the wrong coloured t-shirt in the wrong area is considered very rude. Supporters of one ox don’t even speak the name of the other, referring to them only as “o contrario”.

(And Parintins is the only place in the world you can get a blue can of Coke. Loyalty to one’s ox is taken so seriously that no Caprichoso fan could possibly be seen drinking from a red can of Coke – so Coke actually sell blue cans of cola there).

Fascinated by this tale of possibly the most ox-centric town on the face of the planet, and this massive festival that hardly anybody has ever heard of, I looked up “Caprichoso” on Youtube and the first thing I found was this:

Which gives some idea of the scale of it.

Since then I’ve become quite a fan of the boi-bumbá myself, following the fortunes of boi Caprichoso. Well it’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than football in my opinion . I had originally planned that after finishing Space Giraffe we would book up a trip to actually go and see the festival live – it must be an absolutely fantastic experience to see it all live. Unfortunately our reward for finishing Space Giraffe ended up being financial destitution instead of any kind of commensurate remuneration, and these days where you basically have to keep working flat out and are expected to sell your games for pennies I can’t imagine that I’ll ever get to actually go there. But still I love the Festival, and I like to listen to the music and follow the fortunes of Caprichoso every June.

Anyway – back to my shooter, needing a theme and some kind of polarity gameplay; my thoughts turned to Caprichoso and Garantido, and so the game became Super Ox Wars with the two oxen as the main theme.

The silly story told (in what I hope is typical arcade-ese) in the attract mode tells of the planet “Parint” where the people revere two oxen, and how each ox represents particular characteristics. Parint was invaded by the Marcabians (blame L. Ron Hubbard for that) and now, as ever, it’s down to you, the last pilot, to take off and strike against the invaders, just like in all shooters; but drawing on the powers of the two oxen to repel the invaders. The polarity comes in due to the fact that you can assume the polarity of each ox by shooting and collecting items of their respective colour on the planet surface.

Here we are entering the second stage “BETA-AREA”. Notice that the ship is shooting blue stars (and is in fact tinted a bit blue) – this means you are currently in Caprichoso polarity. Look underneath the scores and you’ll see two oxen, one red and one blue, pushing against each other. This indicator shows how deeply you are invested in whatever polarity you’re in. Here the blue ox has pushed the red one back over to the right, indicating that you’re currently fairly well invested in Caprichoso mode.

The more items of one ox’s colour you collect, the more deeply you are “in” that polarity. Picking up items of the opposite polarity quickly moves the balance back towards the other side.

Here we are coming to a part of BETA-AREA where there are 4 Caprichoso-shaped ground turrets. These will fire at you more if you are in Garantido polarity (as here; notice that the ship is firing red hearts).

So what’s the reason to take any notice of the polarity at all? Well, you needn’t if you don’t want to; it’s perfectly OK to just play the game as a normal shooter, flying along merrily shooting the crap out of everything that comes along and picking up every collectible. You can have fun that way but you won’t get the most points or get the most out of the ship’s weaponry.

The more you collect items of one colour, the more strong you become in that polarity, and the more likely you are to find extra lives and pickups in the shape of the symbol of that polarity (blue stars and red hearts respectively). Gathering these pickups grants firepower powerups in a specific style for each polarity – here the ship is in Caprichoso polarity and towing four stars, each of which is itself firing, yielding the satisfying bullet stream you can see here.

These heart-shaped shockwaves come from picking up spinning heart coins whilst in Garantido polarity.

And here towing red hearts while in Garantido polarity yields onion-like layers of bullets that flow in a cardioid trajectory around your ship.

Each polarity also has an intrinsic property which strengthens the more deeply invested you become (and much more so if you are also towing hearts or stars) – a Caprichoso-oriented ship repels enemy shots, and a Garantido-oriented ship can push enemy shots away with its own shots.

All this may sound a bit complicated but what it basically boils down to is “stick with one colour for a while, and score/firepower/protection blessings will accrue to you”. Which colour becomes your favourite is down to your own personal preference .

Each level contains numerous items of both colours, making it relatively easy to build up a chosen polarity, or collect towards a change if desired. If your ship is destroyed it will return just barely in its previous polarity.

Notice also that there are actually three scores! Everything you shoot with your blue stars gets added to the Caprichoso score, and everything you shoot with the red hearts gets added to the Garantido score. Certain items such as the bonus tiles add to their polarity score according to their own colour instead of that of your bullets, but these are generally small point values. Basically if you’re blue you’ll score blue and if you’re red you’ll score red.

Again, this isn’t anything you need necessarily concern yourself with if you don’t want to. You still have an overall score for your game, which is the total of your Caprichoso and Garantido scores.

So why bother with having separate polarity scores at all? Firstly to encourage you to explore different ways of playing the levels – if you’ve aced a level in one polarity, try playing through with the other. Your overall hiscore on a level is the sum of both best polarity scores, so by doing so you can improve your Restart Best standings for a given level.

Secondly it’s a bit of fun and allows for separate leaderboards for fans of each polarity as well as the overall leaderboard for combined score. There are some achievements given for being “loyal” to one particular polarity over the other.

Which is kinda in keeping with the theme of the two rival oxen .

Memories of Plutos!

So that’s it then – a nice vert scrolling shooter themed around two rival oxen and those pesky Marcabians. I hope you’ll enjoy it! It has the usual Llamasoft features – Universal app, excellent controls, iCade compatible (there’s provision in the iCade controls to play it “old style” by rattling the FIRE buttons for that authentic oldschool feel. Albeit with the option to switch in the autofire if your hand gets tired). We’ve switched over to pure Game Center now (there was a lot of overhead of stuff we never used in Openfeint, good though it was; all I ever really needed was leaderboards and achievements, and it seems to make sense to just get those from GC, since it’s right there baked into iOS).

Here’s a couple of videos showing the game in motion.

Here it is being played on iCade (and note that although as many have noted the background music *is* excellent, it’s not a part of the game. I’m guessing that would be a major problem as it *is* Xevious music. However if you really like it it’s simple enough to do what I did, download the music and play the track on the iPod app in repeat while playing Super Ox Wars).

And here it is being played with my dirty great finger just to show it’s perfectly playable that way. It’s nice too on the iPhone.

Right then, that’s it for now. I’ll report back once the app’s on sale, soon hopefully .

hang on how’d we get into Hover Bovver land??

Yay Gridrunner!

Well I didn’t expect to be posting another “submitted to Apple” entry quite so soon after the last one, it’s only a few weeks ago that we released Caverns of Minos. This one came together rather quickly.

I’ve intended for a while now to do the occasional “historical release”, where I revisit some of Llamasoft’s old back catalogue. However I don’t want to be forever churning out remakes of old games, as making up new ones is generally much more fun. I also hate the idea that some old devs have that back catalogue stuff must be “monetized” by releasing an emulator image and then charging for it. If you’re going to use back cat titles at the very least make something new and nice based upon them, don’t just try and cash in with a 20 year old emulator image, that’s just sucky.

Anyway. Once in a while I intend to have an occasional revisit of an old title, but I’ll do it nicely rather than just as a cheap ass cash-in.

So, Gridrunner was first up. Why Gridrunner? After all I’ve revisited that game so many times over the years maybe it might have been better to do something else? Well, the main reason for choosing Gridrunner to start was that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing a remake, and I always intended this as a tier 1 bang it out quick kind of release (didn’t realise it’d be *this* quick mind). And I already had C++ source code for simulations of the Vic-20 and c64 versions of Gridrunner that I’d made for inclusion in our PC game Gridrunner Revolution. I figured since I had that code already it ought to be pretty easy to port over to the iOS engine, and indeed it was, a couple of days was sufficient to have those games running nicely on iOS.

A couple of 8-bit ports on their own wouldn’t cut the mustard though; they’d be nice to include as free extras but I needed a proper new Gridrunner game to accompany them. Now I’ve been all over the place with Gridrunner over the years – if you check out the History of Gridrunner page on this very site you’ll get an idea of how much ground we’ve covered in Gridrunner’s name.

This time, though, I wanted to get back to basics and to make something closer to the simple origins of the old 8-bit game. Also, both the 8-bit Gridrunners were in a landscape orientation, since that’s the shape that tellies were – but I rather fancied doing a portrait version, because portrait stuff looks lovely on the iCade. And thinking of the iCade I decided on a theme – let’s have a version of Gridrunner in the style of an old arcade machine. If Gridrunner had been a coin-op how might it have looked?

Of course this is a Minotaur Project release so as usual we borrow the style of the old coin-ops but inherit none of the limitations. We can just have fun and make a slick shooter that evokes fond memories of those old arcade days. So of course the game needs an attract mode (almost a forgotten art these days, sadly).

Straight back to basics with the gameplay – no fifty levels full of fifty different kinds of baddies here. You get your basic enemy types, and they ramp up in aggressiveness the more you progress. Which isn’t to say that you’re not going to see the odd surprise here and there the deeper you go into the game; but definitely this is the most “pure” reworking of Gridrunner since the original.

A little green ship is you!

The little green ship, the red grid, the snake enemies – familiar ground to former Gridrunners. Here we’ve just shot open one of the shrapnel bombs that are new to this version.

All our bombs are belong to you.

Near the end of one of the blue grids, a swarm of shrapnel bombs is easy to shoot but requires some dexterity in dodging the resultant shrapnel sprays whilst taking care of that long snake feeding in from the top right.

Also, BASTARD LASER. Would absolutely not be Gridrunner without a bastard laser, now would it?

Twilight Sparkle would approve of these purple shots.

Fortunately one of the additions I’ve made to the original is to bring in lovely lovely powerups with which to smite thoroughly the burgeoning foe. There are eight powerup types gained by collecting colourful spinning rings that emerge from shot enemies.

Bullets. I got them.

Each type is fairly shortlived, but they are stackable – usually collecting a second powerup of the type you’ve already got extends the usage-time, and you can pick up shot speed multipliers to turn the likes of that ring shot there into OMG I AM BECOME BULLETS for a couple of glorious seconds.

There is a restart system to allow players to restart from higher levels; the restart points occur every 4 levels (the grid and enemy colours change every 4 levels too. I was inspired by remembering the different coloured webs in Tempest back in the day. “Getting to the yellow levels” was a thing. So I thought it’d be nice to accompany restart points with grid colour changes).

Anyway I think it’s come out really nicely – it’s fun and challenging to play without being too anal sphincter twitchy like some shooters can be, to the extent where playing them is more an exercise in sustaining an anxiety state as long as you can rather than just having fun and shooting shit. Plays just as nicely on the iPhone too – in fact one of my current hiscores was set on the iPhone, so I know it plays just as well as on iPad .

I’ll leave you with a couple more videos and hopefully we should be seeing some Gridrunnery goodness in the app store in a few days . It’s only tier 1 too so there’s really no excuse at all for not getting it.

This is the full attract mode.

Here’s a closer look at the first few levels.

And here it is being played on the iCade.

see you on the leaderboards soon I hope .

Feedback’s been very good so far with some users reckoning it’s Llamasoft’s best iOS game yet.

Some iPhone users wanted the option to choose controls split left/right (same as the iPad) as well as top/bottom, so a point update has been already submitted with that modification. Users should have it in a few days.

The update also adds specific buttons for iCade users to simulate tilting the device (since you can’t easily do that with your pad in the iCade).

The new game is called “Caverns of Minos”. All finished now, I am just about to submit it to Apple (only waiting on OF approval) so if all goes well it should be out by the end of next week.

Caverns of Minos is a true Minotaur Project style game. This time it’s been done in the style of the old 8-bit Atari home computers, and specifically echoes the style of one of the best known games on that system, a game called Caverns of Mars.

Caverns of Mars was basically a vertical scrolling variation on the Scramble theme. The player had to fly his ship down through twisty caverns filled with rockets on ledges (which never actually launched) and fuel tanks that could be shot to refuel the ship in that crazy logic that 8-bit games always had.

There were sections full of little rockets and fuel ships you had to carefully shoot your way through, and laser gates that flickered on and off and got on everybody’s tits, and eventually you arrived at what looked like a big skyscraper.

At the bottom of the skyscraper was a bomb which you landed your ship on. Landing there armed the bomb and then you had to fly out the cavern before it blew up. If you managed to get out then it was on to the next, more difficult cavern.

Caverns of Mars was notable because it was a slick-looking game that was actually incredibly simple and made great use of the Atari’s graphics hardware. For all that the game scrolls very smoothly not a lot is actually moving. Basically there’s one player sprite sitting over a scrolling tilemap and a couple of missiles for bullets. Everything that moves apart from the player ship and bullets is simply part of the background tilemap. The rockets never launch so the tilemap never needs to have stuff moved around inside it. The laser gates switch on and off by simply redefining a single character. There’s actually next to bugger all going on with the CPU, yet the game looks and plays very polished and smoothly. It’s a really nice, elegant use of the Atari’s hardware. You can watch it in action in this video.

Now as you know, the point of the Minotaur Project is not simply to clone old games. There has to be a mashup of game styles in there, along with plenty of minotaurs in rainbow jumpers. But with what could one mash up good old vert-scrolling Caverns of Mars?

Yup – Lunar Lander.

I’ve always liked lunar lander style games. One of the most ancient genres in all of gaming, Lunar Lander goes back a long way. The idea is a simple one – using only rotate and thrust buttons you have to guide your lander to a safe landing on the Moon. The Atari coinop version pictured above is quite a posh version of it, with vector graphics and a rotatable ship. There were many home computer versions of the game, and the Vic-20′s “Jupiter Lander” is one that I remember fondly.

This simplified the game in that the lander didn’t actually rotate. The main thruster always pointed down, and you had side thrusters to impart lateral motion. When you got close to a landing zone the screen zoomed in to give you a close-up view of your final approach.

The bar on the right hand side was basically a variometer. You had to land with your vertical velocity in the yellow zone or else your ship would blow up. The gentler your landing, the higher bonus you could get.

I’ve always enjoyed these kinds of games where a delicate touch on the thrusters is required. Another favourite of mine did include a rescue mission – the very excellent “Oids” on the Atari ST.

If someone isn’t doing a good remake of Oids for iOS right now then something is not quite right in the world. And if someone IS doing a remake please please please PLEASE God make them do it with decent controls and no awful onscreen joypads.

On the Commodore 64 lovers of thrusting were well served by Space Taxi, which again had the simplified lander model with the main thruster always pointing down and left and right thrusters for lateral motion (it may even have had a top thruster for slowing down, can’t remember now).

Space Taxi didn’t have a rescue mission so much as a business model, in which you scored points for ferrying little Commodore 64 dudes from place to place in a sequence of increasingly bizarre screens whilst trying not to kill them by landing your taxi on them or crashing while one of them was in the cab.

Anyway. So I love me a bit of thrusting, yes I do, and how exactly shall we go about mashing thrusty goodness up with a vert-scrolling Scramble clone?

Like this!

The title screen looks authentically 8-bit-Atarian, albeit with a slightly wiggling ship that would have boggled the very mind of a coder back then. The ability to wiggle sprites was at that point years in the future. Wiggling spaceships were something we could only dream of!

The simplest spaceship is a replica of that one from Caverns of Mars. Pick that one while you’re learning since it responds nice and smoothly to the controls and has stronger shields than most of them, so it can stand a bit of smacking around and occasionally getting caught in a laser without immediately blowing up.

The first thing you’ll see upon entering a cavern is the Mothersheep.

I didn’t want to do the whole setting-a-bomb-and-blowing-up-the-entire-planet thing like in Caverns of Mars. For one thing it’s a bit excessive blowing up a whole planet. What about all the poor innocent little creatures and peoples’ mums who would perish in such a huge retaliation? At least I hope it *is* a retaliation and not a pre-emptive strike. And also I really don’t like sections of games with tight time limits. It’s a sucky way of adding difficulty.

However there has to be a reason for going into the cavern in the first place, and coming back out again, so in the absence of a bomb there’s the quest to please the Mothersheep. She basically asks you to go and fetch her the cavern’s particular treasure. You then fly down to the bottom of the cavern, suffering the slings and arrows of all the nasty crap I put down there for you and also rescuing as many minotaurs as you can along the way, then bring it back to the Mothersheep at the top of the cavern to end the level.

Take a few moments to get used to how the ship handles. For all its vertical-Scramble trappings remember this is basically a gravity/thrust game. The screen doesn’t scroll at a set rate like in Scramble and the original Caverns of Mars. You use the Thrust button to control your rate of descent, and left and right move you left and right as per usual.

This area will look reasonably familiar to people who have seen Caverns of Mars. Of course our ship is a little more beweaponed than the rather weedily armed original, which was constrained by not having very many player missile graphics and the programmer really not wanting to do too much with the 6502 at all for generating graphics. Crap on the ground is also not constrained to remaining there as in the original and as you progress through the levels you will see stuff performing a variety of launching, firing and exploding type operations.

Notice that there are minotaurs in rainbow jumpers everywhere. These gormless but lovable beasts are of course there for you to rescue. You can land on any flat surface and if it’s near some minotaurs they will grunt gratefully and enter your ship in a cloud of love hearts. There are a few things to remember about picking up minotaurs:

- The smoother your landing is, the more impressed the minotaurs will be. Impressed minotaurs mean large bonuses!
- Picking up minotaurs increases the multiplier for everything else that you do. Therefore it would benefit your score to always pick them up as soon as you see them.
- However, picking up minotaurs also replenishes both shields and fuel. There may well come a time when you are limping back to the Mothersheep all battered and torn after a lengthy battle through the cavern, and if you picked up all the minotaurs on the way down there’ll be no way to get extra fuel and shield on the way out. So it behooves you to leave some strategically placed minotaurs through the cavern as you go down so you have some emergency supplies for the way back.

Sometimes a particularly smooth landing will impress a pony.

Here we are arriving at the bottom of the first cavern. It’s extremely easy so I expect everybody to make it here safely. Pick up the red heart to get an extra life, and the cavern treasure here is an old spaceship – I wonder what game that’s from?

On the flight back out to the Mothersheep you may expect to meet a few extra obstacles. Nothing terribly awful, just a few extra things to spice up your life a bit.

The caverns, of course, get gnarlier as you go on. Here you can see a bunch of tempting minotaurs in a laser pit. Do you have the courage necessary to nip into that hole and make them grunt with pleasure? Or will you leave them there alone with their horns?

The original Caverns of Mars had but 5 caverns. We have a bit more than that – 21 caverns in all, some of them quite commendably gnarly indeed. You also get 4 different ships with which to traverse the caverns and you’ll find that with each ship the challenge of the game varies. All caverns and all ships are yours, by the way, with no extra purchasing necessary. No in-app panhandling from Llamasoft, no siree!

The next ship up in difficulty is our old friend from the Vic-20, the Jupiter Lander lander.

Now this ship is a bit of a mixed bag really. It’s very nice and floaty to fly, and it’s the easiest of all the ships to ease down for a nice, soft, pony-impressing landing. However it can be the very bugger to get through the lasers unscathed. You’ll be cursing my name and species when you try for the first time to pass through that triple laser field there with the Jupiter lander. It’s not too bad once you get a feel for it but it’ll take you a few goes.

And you’ll be wanting Brian Blessed’s advanced masters’-degree-level swearing dictionary to hand by the time you reach this level in that ship. Bloody lasers.

The next ship is the taxi. We’ve covered it in weapons and given it the capacity to contain a smegload more minotaurs than the taxi in the Commodore 64 game. It’s actually a pretty nice ship to fly when you get used to it – a bit twitchy, but nicely nippy once you’re settled in. Pity that it does tend to rattle around like a pinball if you smack into anything and the shields aren’t the strongest. And don’t even think of getting any part of it in a laser. The side shooters, however, are a godsend in some levels…

If you want a nice, stiff challenge that’ll put more hairs on your chest than on the chests of the very minotaurs that you’re rescuing (I assure you those chests are pretty well furry, under those rainbow jumpers) then simply select the pointy ship.

Unlike all the other ships, which have been of the simplified kind with lateral thrusters and the main thruster pointing straight down, with the pointy ship we have the proper “rotate and thrust” control action. This makes navigating the caverns way more difficult, and landing to pick up minotaurs properly tricky, as you have to land on your tail fins. However it’s very satisfying to use this ship once you get used to it, and it is probably the most well beweaponed of them all. It’s a proper challenge and just one of the many ways to fly the delicious caverns of Minos!

ARGH NOSE IN LASER

Well that’s pretty much it. Controls as per usual are excellent, split left/right on iPad and top/bottom on iPhone. iCade is supported and the game plays really nicely on that. Each ship has its own leaderboard. Price is tier 2 and the game is worth more than that. But I’ll never ask you to pay more than the initial price.

See you soon on the leaderboards then .

Oh, here’s a video of the gameplay too .

cheers!