"Death Ray Manta:SE"

Posted: 03 December, 2015

I’ve been meaning to jot down a few words about Rob Fearon's Death Ray Manta: SE since I picked it up. It does a few things that I'm a sucker for, and it does them extremely well: It flashes lights. Big purple, red, yellow, blue, colour-cycling, pulsing, throbbing, relentless lights. It treats Alpha Blending like it owns it, while being ever-so-careful not to give you an on-screen whitey. And it’s an Arena Shooter. Colour was invented for Arena Shooters. Flashing lights were invented for Arena Shooters. Lives were invented for Arena Shooters. More people should make Arena Shooters. Especially Arena Shooters with puns in.

DRM gives you one life, and this is the most important bit, in my opinion. One Life Gaming is where Pringle-level addiction comes in. One life that, preferably, you're sweating over for 5 seconds before the expletives come out. One life, balls-out.

No one can go up against Robotron, obvs, but that's not to say it's not worth trying. Geometry Wars ups the ante with the particle count, and increases the arena's size to cope with the physical scale and number of enemies that modern hardware can spawn. Llamatron might not have as many baddies, but it makes up for it with those cunty little laser things, along with a bunch of neat tricks to help you farm a power-up. The trademark Minter saw-tooth difficulty, doing its thing.

DRM takes all these things on-board, liberally applies the overdraw, and smooshes it all into 5 seconds of mayhem. It's like having an eye-test while skydiving, the yellow afterglow on your retina doing a damn good job of hiding the fact that you're about to hit something. Hard. You've barely enough time to clock what gag the text is throwing at you - let alone wait for your eyes to clear - before the next round; BRIGHT LIGHT! GOOOOOOOOOO!

25 minutes is a long time to play a game that can keep you hopping about on the edge like this. It's tiring. I love it.

And let's be honest, games should be physical affairs. Playing Robotron is an act of wrestling with the machine. It actually makes a change to feel knackered after concentrating on, you know, beating a score in 2015.

Rob gets all this. By making his levels fixed - getting rid of the random spawning element of Geo Wars and Robotron - he's balancing things to his liking. He's telling a very exact story to the player. Not through narrative, but by controlling the ride. This makes it accessible. It's possible to memorise the path to the gem for the first 20+ levels, which means it's you’ll recognise your fuck-ups within minutes of playing. And with fuck-ups comes the desire to improve. One more go. Once you pop, you can't stop, and all that. Let's reinforce the point by only giving you that one, stressful life...

Made it to level 26? Whoah, don't fuck up! Sweaty palms yet?! Gngn, no, yes, arrgh, whoops, close, eee... FUCK! All the things the arcade game-developer is looking for, DRM:SE does with zero friction. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.

A while back I knocked up a little 'endless runner' prototype on Android for a programming course that I was giving. Day's work. With only one threat to the player, and one life, it was surprisingly addictive. No graphics. No audio. Just risk and very little reward. Throw in a coin to collect, and bing! You can lead the player into all sorts of shit. Stupidly difficult, unrefined and raw, but I played that prototype for ages. DRM makes me want to go back and finish it off, or at least, play around in the one-life-space. Meanwhile, it's great that Rob's mining what it means to be an arcade game, and doing it with so much style.

Death Ray Manta:SE: 10/10 fish-with-lasers.

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