THE GAME OF HARMONY

Apologies in advance if this game has really good or really bad music and that's what you came here to hear me talk about, my emulator (RetroArch on linux) sometimes refuses to output any audio and this was one of those times.

The name 'The Game Of Harmony' doesn't do much to suggest what the game might actually entail, other than harmony. The game is like no other I have ever played, and it's sort of brilliant. Essentially the game is Asteroids, you rotate using left and right, press A to fire your thruster and press B to do an instant 180 degree turn, which is really handy. There are orbs with shapes in them, press two orbs with the same shape together and they disappear. Press two orbs together with different shapes inside though, and a new orb will form. The orbs start out really tiny, and you can pick these up for extra health, then they become full sized and eventually explode. The goal is to clear out all of the orbs before your health depletes.

Some orbs are connected with ropes, which stretch and attract the orbs to each other with a sense of momentum. Like in Asteroids you can wrap the screen, and if an orb with a string attached wraps the screen it barrels to the other end, which is a good way to connect like shapes. As you may be able to imagine, you're good at moving the orbs around the game is great, but it doesn't take long at all for the chaos to begin, and once it starts it's very hard to have it stop.

One extra orb becomes two, then five, then the original ones start to explode and on it goes until you die. Asteroids-style controls isn't exactly the easiest to maneuver around, especially with any amount of precision. It doesn't help that the game lags hard, running at a low frame rate as the Game Boy struggles to process momentum and positions of every orb, and that's just with the ones that are there at the start of the stage. It's a miracle the Game Boy can handle these calculations on-the-fly at all, and I wonder what this game would look like if it was remade by developers at the end of the systems lifecycle, when developers knew how to squeeze every ounce of horsepower out of it. This is a relatively early Game Boy game, from 1990.

Another quirky thing is the high score screen, where you can input 13 letter names, and the defaults are the developers from studio Code Monkeys. The game itself was published by Accolade, of Bubsy fame, and I think I can safely say this is the best thing I've played from them. Much better than Bubsy 3D, Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind.