Wednesday 19 June 2013

Option Monster (PC)

This was going to be a post about all the stuff on volume thirteen of the PC Disc Station series, but for some reason, after searching all my hard drives and storage devices, I could only find an incomplete set of files for it, from whence this game was the only one i could get working. Nor could I go and re-download the disc image, since some malodourous vermin has seen fit to conspire against Underground Gamer, probably the most important resource there has ever been in preserving obscure games and their related ephemera. Luckily, I do seem to have most of the later volumes in their entirety.
Anyway, on to the game itself. There are three main qualities the PC Disc Station games tend to have in common: they're often very short, feature a score system centred around defeating multiple enemies at once and they also tend to have beautifully crafted pixel graphics.
The game takes place over three worlds, each of which contains five or six stages. The stages are all top-down mazes full of enemies, who must be dispatched by throwing your titular option monster at them.
The monster bounces off the walls (but not enemies), and after a few seconds will return to you. Obviously, the way to play is to ensure that the monster bounces around as much of the screen and hits as many enemies as possible with each throw, ensuring the maximum score.
There are power-ups on each stage, revealed when the option monster travels over them. The two main types of power-up are "non-stop", which temporarily exends the amount of time your monster can spend bouncing around the screen, and "+1", which gives you an extra monster to throw around.
As I've said before about Disc Station games, Option Monster is a lot of fun to play, the only problem being its extreme shortness, leaving interesting mechanics and ideas never to be expanded on.

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