Just when I thought the PSP homebrew scene is dead, I found another gaming gem. The game is called Mr Driller and I was expecting some crappy port of Drill Dozer from Gameboy Advance. Fortunately, I have decided to give it a try first.
The game turned out to be really cool. The idea is simple - player controls a character that has to drill down through multiple coloured layers, while paying attention to their oxygen levels. Air can be regenerated by collecting capsules of oxygen, but they are usually blocked by blocks that are very hard to drill through. When drilling down, player must be very careful not to destroy blocks that support other blocks, which in turn will cause rocky avalanche and flatten our hero down. So simple and yet so amusing.
The game is not perfect - there is no music, sounds are few and far between, animation is simplistic, there are no saves, game can be damn frustrating later on. Still, the most important factor, meaning gameplay, is there. This game is actually fun to play and quite addictive too. As an additional plus, it plays well in short bursts, for example on the bus. Highly recommended!
Post Scriptum for Old Geezers
And now lengthy post scriptum with a personal twist. When I was playing the game, I had a feeling of deja-vu - irritating impression that I have seen it somewhere, some day, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Fortunately, I work with other guys that started their adventure with computers in the eighties, and one of them just glanced at the game and shouted "Kret!".
Kret (meaning The Mole in English) was an old shareware game (for Dos, meaning really old) where idea was somewhat similar. I started looking for the game over the net and finally have found it here. It is abandonware anyways so feel free to give it a try. Mr Driller does not actually steal the idea, it is in fact quite different, but the mechanics of blocks falling and supporting each other looks familiar, which explains my deja-vu.
On a side note in order to make matters even more twisted, there exists a port of DosBox (Dos emulator) for PSP, so I think it should be doable to run Kret on the PSP.
2 comments:
Oh, for me Kret was actually an early nineties thing. Indeed, my adventure with computers started in the eighties ('81 or '82 if I recall correctly). Man, I remember a game on an 8 inch disk where you shot down Pershing missiles - those were the days!
Heh, I joined when 5 inch diskettes were still a normal thing, but I had to load my Spectrum games using tapes, argh.
Kret was indeed early nineties as far as I can remember.
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