One of the most interesting games that came out of the recent WCES was the "Anti-Tetris on a Sphere" called Phear, by H₂0 Productions. There's been a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for this title, but faith and begorrah, not many specifics. Well, leave it to our ace Jeff Minter to generously provide a look at this third-party effort.
Phear is a weird kinda first-person-perspective Tetris-kinda game. I played it for the first time at Atari yesterday, and it's pretty neat. There's this sphere in the middle of the screen made up of a patchwork of areas of different colours. Using the joypad you can rotate the sphere in any direction. The objective of the game is to eat away the colours on the sphere, revealing the glowing core. Each level requires that you expose an increasing amount of contiguous core segments - 2x2 for the first, 2x3 for the next, etc. To do this, you are given a block - say, green 2x2, or blue 1x3. The shadow of the block appears on the sphere, and you have to rotate the sphere so that the same colour segments are 'below' you, under the shadow, then you press the button and the sphere kinda comes up and kisses you and the blocks are removed. Get it wrong and the block is added to the surface of the sphere. All the while the sphere moves towards you and if it gets too close, or you allow your mistakes to stack up too high, you lose.
Sounds weird but it's pretty much fun. Freakish, nyet? But you can't say you've seen this sucker before. AEO Editor-He's-Large Travis spoke with H₂0 a few days ago, and it appears that actual coding on the game will be finishing up in a matter of weeks.
(AEO 4/2)