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| | Genre: Puzzle & Trivia | | Min OS X: 10.3.1  CPU: Any CPU Hard Disk: 14 MB |
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Do you like explosions? (Is the Pope a Catholic?) If you're into Big Bang Theory, Blast Miner might be just what you're looking for. But then again, it might not.Blast Miner is an intriguing departure from the current crop of casual games, and in fact it's quite a departure from anything else that's available right now. It's a puzzle game in which the emphasis is very much on taking time to work things out, experiment with different approaches, and work your way patiently towards your goal. The premise is very simple. You're in a mine that's full of rocky obstacles, and there's a gold nugget (or perhaps a few gold nuggets) that you want to extract. Rather than going in with a pick and digging, your only option is to blast that gold right out of the ground. (It's a step up from washing that girl right out of your hair, but probably similarly incendiary.) Blasting the gold out of the ground is the easy bit. Getting it right out of the mine is the hard part, because the gold usually starts off somewhere near the bottom of the screen, perhaps buried under a pile of rubble, and the exit is generally much closer to the top of the screen, so your attitude towards gravity needs to be one of general defiance. Gameplay: Repeating repetitions If Blast Miner had to be compared with another game, the closest in concept would probably be Enigmo, in that both involve guiding something towards a goal by placing a series of components and inducing some sort of chain reaction. However, whereas Enigmo is a constant stream of interaction in which particles alter their courses dynamically, in Blast Miner it's much more a case of 'light the fuse and stand well back'. In this game you set up your components and then initiate the sequence to see what the effect will be; then, assuming you don't achieve the desired result (and you're very unlikely to on the first attempt), you tweak your solution appropriately and try again. And again. And again. And...So, what are those components? Well, there are stones, which don't do anything but can be useful as supports for other objects. There are sparks and gas cans; sparks are what you generally use to set off your chain of events, whereas gas cans, when broken, produce further showers of sparks. There's TNT, which explodes when set off by a spark; and there are gas drops, with which you can paint the ground and which then behaves like TNT. There are acid drops, which are like sparks except that they dissolve whatever they touch; and there are acid barrels, which turn into acid drops when exploded. And finally there are timed bombs: you place these and set a countdown timer (up to 10 seconds), whereupon they go BOOM! And those are all the things you have to play with. Each one costs money; stones cost a mere $50, but each new object costs an additional $50, right up to $500 for a timed bomb, so this is where rationing comes in. You have a fixed budget for each level, and that restricts the number of components you can buy, so to succeed you must blast out the gold with the finances provided. To play the game, you just click on the components at the bottom of the screen to choose the one to place, and then click where you want it to go. The screen is divided into squares during placement, to make it easy to see where you can put elements, and in some levels you are prevented from placing items in some locations, either to give you a clue as to a tricky solution or (more usually) to make your task more difficult. Once you've placed elements in positions that you hope will yield a positive outcome, you click the Test button. This causes the spark you've placed to start to fall towards the TNT or gas can you've placed somewhere below it, and timed bombs to start to count down. After the resulting chain reaction has finished, either you'll have completed the level successfully or, more probably, you won't. Assuming you haven't, you can either go straight back to editing mode or use some handy controls to play back the existing sequence. You can play it back as many times as you like to see what the problems may be, and, helpfully, you can also watch it in slow-motion mode. There's an accelerated viewing mode, too, for when you want to speed up those slower time-bombs.
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