Pyramids of Ra

Pyramids of RAAAA!!!

This game has nothing to do with pyramids, except for the hoochie coochie is a music sting. If you grew up playing CoolMath a lot than you may have played B-Cubed, a game where you slide a cube around disappearing tiles and can't clear the stage unless you've deleted every tile. This is that, but top-down and you play as a bouncing ball that casts a fun shadow on the top of the screen. Something about that effect raises this games score a good deal, anything that makes clear note of being in a Game Boy and trying to feel like there's 3D depth and that this is a physical game like that is exactly my jam.

You jump around on disappearing tiles, some tiles take more than one bounce to clear, like B-Cubed. there's a ton of stages, with very complicated passwords. You can stand in place for a bit to think, with a timer that resets on every bounce. This game also does scoring weird there's no lives but every time you fail a stage you score less per bounce, until you're only scoring fractions of points. It's punishing if you care about your points, but is very forgiving if you just want to solve the puzzle. It doesn't send you all the way back either, you can just repeat the same puzzle.

There's not much else to say about this game, I've sort of covered it all already. The song on the title screen sounds like the old Spider-Man theme, that's fun. It's a fun game, good to play for a bit here and there, I can imagine this being a great way to make a car ride go by with an FM radio playing Casey Kasem's Top 40 or a DVD-now with SpongeBob episodes. Just wear headphones, the sponge will drive your parents mad. Shoot I'm going on a road trip tonight, but I'm driving, nuts. Oh also this game is published by Matchbox, the toy car makers, one of only two games they actually published. Odd!