Rollerball

Break Space

Dave

Dave Sloane

ROLLERBALL Dvader PWYW / $2 Dave's Review The proliferation of household cleaning robots has inspired a few Speccy games of late (The Mojon Twins 'Rumba' and er... that's about it actually), the latest being Dvader's Rollerball. You are a constantly bouncing droid tasked with cleaning the cobwebs from the nooks and crannies of a palatial yet sparsely decorated home. I could do with a bot like that, and it'd have an easy ride in my manky old terrace because it isn't festooned with baddies and spikes. Rollerball is a simple & short game controlled with two keys, leaving the player's other hand free to read an improving book or eat wholefoods. The perpetual bounce does make it a challenge though. Just jumping over a horizontal nasty takes planning-not so easy when you're contemplating Ulysses with a mouthful of figs. There are screens where I suspect it's impossible to clean all the cobwebs without losing a life, though maybe I'm the issue, and like a fat-eared rugby pundit I'm blaming everything on 'the bounce of the ball'. So while you do get a generous 8 lives, 10 minutes, and cleaning the cobwebs is merely optional, I'd be impressed if you completed it on your first go. Rollerball gets the essentials of gameplay right, but there's room for improvement. It's not the easiest game on the eye - the dappled backgrounds clash and you rarely see the complete sprite. On a normal Speccy, some of the colour combinations are brave, verging on gaudy; this is because it takes advantage of MPAGD's easy access to the extra colours of ULA+. The against-the-clock thrill would be enhanced with some AY music. This is the author's first game, and on release they expressed reservations about its quality. Such concerns were unwarranted, because Rollerball has rightly been well-received. It's an addictive hi-score challenge that I keep returning to, trying to shave seconds off my time with marginal and not-so-marginal gains. At the time of writing: 4 mins 54 sec, 51 cobwebs, final score 81376. BEAT THAT!

After ULA+. I hope you like brown.

Before ULA+