|
|
ManiaGP (Puzzle) by Team K2YAA  Now this is by far one of the most polished Tetris clones I've ever seen! There are two versions, a smaller version which is dubbed a demo taking up a little over 10 MB, and the full version which takes up close to 30 MB. Trust me, the full version is worth it. Although the entire story portion is in Korean, the cartoon graphics and still cutscenes are a beauty to behold. Excellant anime type drawings based on the "Oh My Goddess!" Japanese anime series really add a lot to the feel of the game. Without it, it seems like just tetris (which still isn't bad, but why bother for 10 MB?). The "demo" version obviously has less cutscenes, still instead of animated menus and is limited to only one background song during game play (which although is a really high quality K-pop song, gets really annoying fast). The full version has everything the demo doesn't. In fact, after playing 8 levels of increasing difficulty (i.e. the speed increases and increasingly complex structures of set pieces are preset on the bottom of your screen, making it difficult to clear the bottom) I didn't once hear a repeated background song! Minor sound pops (typical of GP32 games) occur when the music loops and sometimes between cut scenes, but otherwise the sound quality is excellant. Control is simple and as you would expect. No surprises. A bar appears on the left side of the screen which fills as you clear lines. When you reach a certain point, you win the level and move on. Of course, multiple line clears will fill the meter faster. There are a decent amount of voice samples used as well for clearing multiple lines, receiving bonuses and completing certain levels. The background of each level is a different snap shot from the "Oh My Goddess!" anime and fits the feel very nicely. Trust me, this could have easily been a commercial product and we should all thank our lucky stars that these types of games are free and possible because of the GP32's terrific homebrew scene and in particular, GamePark for allowing programmers to make games without having to license software. In short, give this one a try if you have the room on your memory card. It's well worth the space and resides permanently on mine! Download ManiaGP from GP32x.de Download ManiaGP from PDRoms.de
Review by Rhihanion Nov/14/2004. |
