The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

i played some more digidrive last night and i'm getting the hang of using fuel tanks. at least enough to unlock the "modern" skins. which are lovely.
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[Harveyjames]

[dessgeega]

i do happen to love the do-it-yourself chiptunes one. but yeah, i don't know if i would have paid for the game.
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[Cycle]

I actually started playing with electroplankton last night and fell in love with it. I was fooling around for ages. I loved creating accidently beatiful music.

I do agree with james though, some of these are just funny shaped/inconvenient keyboards like the snowflakes. it encourages making music accidently though, since all the snowflakes move around.

i really like the chiptunes one, the snowflakes, and the spinning discs one, but i do wish you had a little more control (even if that would be against the point of the program) AND that there were more dynamic ones like harvey described. Still! This is the perfect thing i've been looking for - something i can play when i can't sleep at 2am.
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[dessgeega]

yeah, i pretty much play electroplankton exclusively in bed.

that's kind of true of almost all portable games i play, though.
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[Anonymous]

Orbital was one of my favorite gaming experiences last year. I got a very similar enjoyment out of this to that being described about Kororinpa in the Wii thread. You're navigating a course, and there are bonus items (moons) to collect that you use to unlock the last ten levels. But these are open courses in which you sculpt your path by using gravity and anti-gravity. Once one gets the hang of the techniques, it's an experience like nothing else to navigate the courses. This game not only has extremely difficult later levels, but supports a very high level of play even in the early levels. On account of the excellent level design it's very satisfying to try to improve scores, by collecting more satellites, and times, by seeking an ideal path through the level.


I want to post some tips here since it seems like some people in this thread aren't getting much out of this game. I apologize that this will seem pedantic but I want to explain things thoroughly.

High school physics review:
Velocity is the rate of change of position. It is a vector-something with magnitude and direction. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity-it is also a vector. F=ma, in other words, the acceleration of a moving body is proportional to the force acting on it. In the absense of an external force, a body moves at a constant velocity. One fact about Newton's law of gravity is crucial: The direction of the gravitational force exerted by one body on another is towards that body. The force exerted by several bodies is the vector sum of the individual forces.


Ok, now for basic gameplay advice. When you don't hold either button down, you're moving at a constant velocity(unless you're in orbit-but more on that later). This is key-you don't need to be holding down buttons most of the time. Pressing the attract button turns on your mass, and all of the bodies in the area exert forces on you in accordance with newton's law. With the repel button, your mass is treated as negative-this reverses the directions of the force and thus acceleration vectors.

In most games, you directly control your character's velocity, not acceleration. That is the main reason why the controls in Orbital are so confusing. Frequently you need to ignore the buttons and simply enjoy the music as your planet floats through space towards its destination.


The first fundamental gameplay technique is to tap, not hold, the buttons to nudge your velocity vector to be a desired direction and line up with something. This is exactly what you need to do to collect the first planet in the first level. If you tap, the force is on for just a moment, so you can just think that a vector is being added to your velocity vector.


There is a situation where forces are applied to your character without holding a button-you can enter orbit around a planet if you are close enough(and also moving in the correct direction), in which case you move at constant angular velocity instead of constant velocity. In orbit, the attract and repel buttons work in the obvious way. However, if you are on the very edge of the orbit, and you tap the repel, you will be released from orbit and continue moving at the velocity you were moving at that point in the orbit, namely, in the straight line tangent to the orbit.

This is the second fundamental technique-to enter orbit around a planet, and then exit it a bit later to aim yourself in some direction(say, at a planet you want to pick up or at another planet you want to orbit). This is slingshotting.


You don't need to use the predefined orbits to orbit or slingshot. If one body dominates among the different gravity force vectors by being much larger or closer or several bodies are clustered so that they act as one large object, and you hold down the positive mass button, your orbit trajectory will be approximately a Keplerian orbit-ie a parabola, hyperbola, circle or ellipse. So you can slingshot outside of the predefined orbits of a planet. This is the final basic technique. Usually, since there will be other forces interfering, you need to sometimes release to correct the orbit. Usually it feels like: hold, release, hold, release, as opposed to the tapping I mentioned earlier.

I hope this information is helpful.

[dessgeega]

it is!

i'm probably going to give this game another try soon.
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[Harveyjames]

I can remember rushing to finish Orbital in giddy anticipation of what might happen at the end, since in the backgrounds you can see that you're slowly approaching planet Earth level by level. Looking back I can't really see why I ever found this such a big incentive to finish the game. I like the game ok, though.

[dessgeega]

i think i'm getting the hang of digidrive. not enough to get high scores, but enough to get 2000 points, which got me a bunch of soccer skins.
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