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| MAFFia |
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I'm not sure if I played this game back at the uDevGames 2002 where it first appeared, but I have a vague memory of launching it quick and forgetting about it. If I did, that was a huge mistake.
As far as freeware games come... I doubt they can be much better than this.
In William Reade's MAFFia, the goal is simple: Kill the sheep. Now the gameplay is a lot more refined than that though. You have 4 different weapons with different caliber and fire rate (the largest and slowest being a flamethrower of sorts). And with these weapons you are not only to kill the sheep, but to link the kills together by hitting several sheep at once. You also get bonuses for killing the sheep just before they escape, for hitting them after a long fall, for getting them high into the air, for hitting one sheep several times... and so on. The chains you can put together are completely amazing at times.
Now the gameplay might sound rather repetitive, since the game only has a few levels, but you start finding new ways to play the game. Today I tried to keep one sheep in the air as long as possible... I ended up hitting it 140 times before I lost it. Not much was left of the sheep I killed to get this number, and that was only the first attempt. Anotehr sport I found is trying to get as many extra lives as possible. Since this is done by splitting the sheep up in several parts, it's almost only possible to do with the flamethrower, which is extremely hard to get long chains with, and thus results in rather low scores.
The game is extremely well balanced, even though I found myself thinking "now how in Bork's name did I miss that sheep" when a sheep occasionally runs straight through a cloud with several dead sheep and heavy gunfire.
Now if you haven't understood this by now (and I have to be honest, you have to be a complete moron to miss that), this game is extremely sick... but in an extremely satisfying humorous way. The simple cartoonish graphics make it feel like a fun sport instead of something extremely gross. You kill the sheep, do your best to link them together, but you never ever get the idea of trying this for real.... because the game feels so extremely unreal.
I'm having a hard time trying to decide wether to categorize the game as action or puzzle though... It's an interesting mix.
I'd love a multiplayer version with competitive co-op though ;) Trying to steal the chains from somebody else would be great fun.
Posted on November 25, 2004 at 3:08 pm
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