SOME people spend all day making huge amounts of money. Other people spend all day trying to work out how the first lot of people managed to make all that money. Still more people, I suspect, will shortly spend all day trying to knock a couple of brightly coloured balls together.
I make this astonishing claim because, you see, I have played E-Motion. The object of the game, though perhaps the term experience is more apt, is to knock together similarly coloured balls while keeping them away from any different coloured balls - a sort of spherical apartheid.
Simple, you might think. But the balls do not like each other - there are repulsive forces at work. And even more complicated, some of them are joined together by elastic ropes.
Your player, denoted by a sphere with things on top which make it resemble an aerial view of a Clanger, must bounce off things and do stuff to bring them together. After a period they will go critical and atomise, leaving a nasty mess, so watch out when they start vibrating horribly.
Every collision plays a note, so when the game gets busy it reminds me of my sister's early piano lessons. Excellent effects, like being trapped inside a Mellotron. If the backgrounds are not in HAM then they are a fairly good imitation. Ray-traced graphics lend the game a weird and futuristic appearance.
Fifty levels of puzzles, each more cunning than the last. E-Motion is brought to you by Assembly Line, the development team which produced Pipe Mania, so it is used to these highly addictive thinking games. Mind you, the same team was also responsible for Xenon II...
E-Motion is all about population control. The idea is to bang away like an armed policeman without creating babies. Or something like that. You control an, erm... thingy with an arrow on top showing the direction in which you're facing. Knocking balls of the same colour together causes them to disappear. If, by some careless accident, two orbs of different colours collide, baby balls are produced. Being a good cannibal you eat them, because if you don't they grow into big balls themselves of yet another colour.
Simple ideas are often the best, and knocking balls together has to be one of the simplest game concepts since billiards. Graphically, it's also very simple (if slow and Spectrum-esque on the 64) but functional with balls and elastic moving realistically with inertia and momentum. Solo games are fun, but it's in simultaneous two-player mode that the game really comes into its own. Without extensive cooperation you invariably end up hysterically knocking the spheres all over the place, the numerous resulting pods making the play area resemble a Smarties ad. It's all great fun, but at times so frustrating you'll want to do something more violent than bash balls together!
E-Motion is one of the weirdest games I've ever seen, but that was no deterrent to instant addiction on my part. The idea is utterly simple, but with just a few strands of elastic and the odd obstacle it becomes completely aggravating - and incredibly addictive. Phil and I were completely hooked by this one and played it for ages, getting surprisingly far. The Amiga game is obviously the best presented; the HAM backgrounds are attractive while all objects are well drawn and move very smoothly. The C64 version is initially rather disappointing, looking distinctly Spectrum-esque. However to have any more colours would make things far too slow, so I'm thankful US Gold have done it this way, preserving most of the excellent gameplay. A tiny bit sluggish perhaps, but great fun all the same.