0xCELERATOR

Welp, this is not a fun year so far...

0xCELERATOR is a game produced by then freshmen at Digipen, but you already knew that if you clicked on the link at the bottom of this page like a good little internet troll.

Quick disclaimer before we begin: I don't claim to be an expert in game design.  All I have is my 17 years of experience playing and loving the medium.  I only made one game in my life and it was a sub-par, text-based rpg that I don't even have on my hard drive anymore.  The team who made this has nothing but my utmost respect because I couldn't make a game like 0xCELERATOR if I tried...then again, after playing it, I'm not sure I'd want to.

The game starts off promisingly enough with the Digipen logo smoothly fading in and out before making way to a pleasing synthesizer loop along with the menu screen.  In fact, the game's entire soundtrack is pretty good, if minimalistic.

To be fair, the whole game isn't terrible.  It was just frustrating as all hell.  Allow me to briefly describe my play experience.

I started the game and was immediately dropped into the action, which is good.  I never like it when games feel the need to map out the functions of the buttons rather than simply designing the game well enough for the player to figure it out on their own.  I then pressed the right arrow key for a while, occasionally pressing space to dodge treacherous 2-foot high jumps, and basically zoned out until my sprite burst into a million peices, accompanied by an explosion sound effect.  This was either because I won the level or I died.  0xCELERATOR didn't feel obliged to distinguish the two events.  Following this pattern, I worked my way swiftly through the levels before coming to a grey screen.  the game had hidden itself behind a grey screen.  I pressed buttons and heard sound effects, but with no video, and integral part of the VIDEO game was lost.  So, I quit the game, started it up again and found that all my progress had been wiped.

let me go ahead and repeat that for you...

all my progress had been wiped.

This game requires you to beat it all in one go.

How is this considered acceptable?  I appreciate that in the days of the NES, when gaming was a new thing and the hardware had severe limitations, such blunders were annoying but accepted like a relative who plays with their food at thanksgiving.  0xCELERATOR was made in 2012! Even that crappy text-based game I made a few years ago had a save feature, and it had a total playtime of about ten minutes!

On top of that one very noticeable flaw, the game feel isn't even that good.  As I said before, all the player really does is hold the right arrow key and enjoy the spectacle, but the game's graphical style (which literally consists of nothing but colored lines) isn't much of a spectacle to behold.  The controls have a sickening warm-up time to them, making the button presses feel more like polite suggestions than commands.

Then again, that's just my opinion.  Why not click the link below and see for yourself?  It's a small file, so your total experience from clicking "download" to finishing the game shouldn't last more than 10 minutes.

For a freshman project, I suppose it could have been a lot worse.  Perhaps I've been spoiled by the triple-A world of gaming.  Maybe this year will teach me to appreciate the work it takes to create a video game.  After all, I'm sure the physics in 0xCELERATOR were fairly difficult to program.

Oh well, that's all for now.  Frankly I wish I was more enthused about the rest of the year, but hey.  Somewhere along this huge line of games, there has to be at least one other Nitronic Rush to make it all worth it.  

As always, thanks for viewing.  Keep gaming and stay beautiful.


links

0xCELERATOR: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26134
youtube page that I assume belongs to Macklin Guy, the art and level designer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00DxZNBP01o&list=UU3xnn_4T3UiC6pAY-Dv2--w&index=2