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Released to the world in 1989, Drip is a game by Art Skiles; who single-handedly coded and scored this little gem - his only game to ever make it to the Amiga. It can be found on C.U. Amiga Coverdisk #35 (downloadable from the Amiga Magazine Rack web site) or from the Animet archives. The game needs the minimum CPU requirements and runs on just about every Amiga configuration. However, the game may be unplayably fast on 030+ machines as it was originally coded with 000 timings in mind.
Smarter Than The Average Drip
The game opens with a kick-ass 'Yaa!' sample, and a bar of looping music frames a rather average title screen. The options are few: either press '1' for single player mode, or '2' for two player (non cooperative) mode, or 'E' to exit back to workbench. Pressing 'I' also brings up an information screen which attempts to feature the nonsensical plot...
Apparently, you play a drip - that's right, a drop of water - who was languishing around at a party one day when, suddenly, the supply of 'Party Juice' was hijacked by foes unknown. Following the supply lines back, Drip (Damp Rescuer of Interrupted Parties), finds a maze of pipes leading back to the enemies lair, and it's his job to rust all the pipes and set the Party Juice flowing again. What could be easier?
Open The Taps!
As the game cranks up, you are dropped right into the middle of a pipe maze - ready to rust! But just to add that little bit of extra spice, our hero blows a huge wolf whistle to alert usually two or three enemies to the screen. Another single breakbeat of music begins and away we go. Controlling our Drip is very easy, and as we move around the screen the pipes rust underneath us. Pressing the fire button will make our character hop off his immediate perch onto the one below, and the player is able to move diagonally in mid drip. Similar to Pac-Man, exiting the left side of the screen will teleport us to the right hand edge, and falling off the bottom of the screen will make us reappear at the top. In this way, the levels wrap around each other, making often quite complex hit and run manoeuvres possible.
Once all the pipes have been fully rusted away, the whole screen collapses and the bonus points are collected up and added to the score and extra lives handed out. The player starts with 5 lives which can be upped by one or two at the end of each level depending on how much bonus time is left at the end. If the bonus counter drops to zero during the game, a life is lost and the bonus counter is reset, but time is not usually an issue to begin with.
The 16 levels in Drip are all pre-defined but often appear in a semi-random order. There are three standard level themes in the game, with a fourth theme appearing after level 6. The three themes are: Acid, Ice and Fire, and each level will contain a number of spill-over pipes which fire acid drops, ice cubes or fire balls accordingly. On contact with these our sprite will scream out a 'Yaow!' or a 'Blaa!' and drop a life.
Little Fluffy Clouds
Each level has a number of extra features which also need to be negotiated. The first is a little cloud which can appear at random travelling left or right on screen. If this cloud should touch a pipe it will immediately un-rust it, meaning the player must go back and rust it again. The only way out of this is to collide with the cloud and pop it out of existence - which can make for some frantic 'dripping' when the cloud appears. There are also two collectable items which literally balloon in from the sides. The first is a yellow star, which on collection gives us a shield which kills enemies on contact, and gives the player 10 seconds of rest time before the enemies appear again. The second collectable is a red heart, and collecting this will make all enemies on screen run straight towards you. For this reason hearts are not a welcome gift.
Finally, one more addition to the game takes the whole thing to another level - the bubbles. A bubble with periodically appear from the bottom of the screen and float to the top. If our hero manages to drip into the bubble he can ride it around the screen in all 8 directions (similar to the Bubble Car in Second Samurai). We can then instantly loop-de-loop around the screen, reaching all those hard to get to places (usually the spill-over pipes), and as an added bonus, while we are inside the bubble we are immune to spill-over debris. The bubble will last a good 10 seconds before it will flicker and pop; dripping us onto whatever lies below. On later levels the bubbles become electric - electrifying parts of the pipe maze (and us), and making it harder to drip ourselves into one without getting a painful shock!
Pure Reflex Action
After every three levels of mayhem, the games gives us a break in the shape of a reflex test. On this screen we see four targets with a water droplet rapidly moving down the screen. If we can hit the trigger at the same time as the droplet hits the target we get another (well needed) life. The drops get faster as we move along the line to make the reflex game more of a challenge. Then we are sent straight back to the pipeline to get rusting. From level 7 however it all changes, and we are taken to the fourth scenario: namely the Electrical levels. Here the player must use all their skill to navigate the levels whilst avoiding the huge electro-traps which litter the area. The electro screens start tough and get harder, until they become almost impossible, and players who get this far know electro-traps means certain and total frustration and death. 8 levels and a lazer battle later - we reach the final boss; which, as you can tell from the above paragraph is 99% impossible and requires more than just a dogged and relentless dedication to beat. In fact, this reviewer bets you'll never get anywhere near this far without cheating.
There are many things to like about Drip. The simplicity of control and the added dimension of 'dripping' all over the screen is a very unique game device - seen neither before nor since. The enemies too - although few in number (a maximum of four on screen) are really quite intelligent, and will wander away when you have a star power-up, and otherwise fiendishly cut you up at every given opportunity. Sometimes an enemy will dive at you when you least expect it, or will guard unrusted pipes - forcing you to take huge risks, or will latch on to your tail, forcing you to manically drip yourself out of trouble. I've seen enemies work as a team to drive you over the edge, or into a situation you simply can't get out of - often leaving the player frustrated but with a healthy respect for these guys.
Running Hot And Cold…
When all your lives have been flushed down the toilet, we are given the final humiliation of the high score screen; where we can add our moniker to the latest hard fought effort. The high score table saves to disk as a file - which can easily be copied into the directory of a friends copy of the game. However, there is no feature to combine high scores ala Deluxe Galaga.
The graphics of Drip is quite nicely drawn - certainly enough for a Public Domain game - and make use of 32 colours. The background is a fading blue gradient; which although basic is far batter than having a multi-parallax 256 colour kaleidoscope to deal with. Basically the game is functional in all areas including the sound department; the looping breakbeat music is just about good enough to avoid being annoying, and the sound effects are bold and meaty - especially the 'Crunch!' as the player gets hit by an ice cube. Ouch!
In fact the only real down-side to Drip is in its longevity. It may take many hours of pleasure to get beyond level 6, but having done so, the electro-traps become a nightmare of the highest order. Playability takes a sharp nose dive into the muck from here on in; as the player looses one life after another trying to judge unfair gaps in the electrical hell, and lucky breaks are few. This is a real let down as, as mentioned previously, the first few levels are a joy to play through and master. The bottom line is that Drip is fun for a while - and very addictive in the first instance - but crumbles to dust once the player gets beyond the point of sanity or reason.
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Some nicely drawn graphics for the most part, and the end-game boss certainly has some detail, but it's really only P.D material.
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The sound effects and music seem to have been bolted on to this title at the last moment. Some looping music could get annoying, but a few meaty sound effect help to save the day.
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This is the average playability score: the game deserves perhaps an 8/10 early on but later levels barely scrape a 3/10 - and it's hard to take this game seriously once the playability takes a dive into the cold shower.
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| However, the game itself is a very novel idea, unique in fact. The pac-man style of some of the features certainly weren't lost on this reviewer, and for a long time I was addicted to this game. Overall: Great for a bash now and then. |
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