Mac|Life - August 2009

>>>Play Have Mac, will game

Look Mom, I can fly! Never mind that it’s through my own upchuck.

SPEWER
OnE Sick GaME

When Finals start to creep up on me, I immediately go into my pseudo-rebellious version of the fetal position, a combination of junk food and video games. Of course, as a fairly resourceful student, I manage to find the most time-intensive and least-productive games on the Internet. The concept of educational games like Brain Age (for the Nintendo DS) or even things like online poker, which could raise my earning potential, fall too close to studying for me.

Thus, I present Spewer, a free game built with Adobe Flash that is at best, antithetical to everything pedagogical, at worst, an insult to human development, and as a result, my favorite game for finals month.

The premise is fairly simple: You are a puffball that oddly resembles Kirby, and you traverse various mazes in traditional platformer style. Each stage (among 60) has its own obstacles, steadily growing in complexity.

So, what makes Spewer different from the hundreds of other brain-numbing Mario clones on the Interwebs? First, the graphics are outstanding. The Spewer world could be realistic, save for the blobs with cognitive ability. Second, the game has an impressive physics engine, and every jump, swim, and ricochet is consistent with gravity. Most significantly, though, the entire game centers around your character eating and spewing... wait for it...vomit, which acts a weapon, flotation device, jet pack, or even a platform.

Red vomit is extremely explosive and can propel you to high platforms. Black vomit is sticky, and you can jump on it after it coagulates. Yellow vomit is acid, and melts through certain platforms, and white vomit, the most frustrating, creates clouds that you can “fly” through, but more often fall through, bringing the spewer to its spiky demise.

Once you get past the fact that you have to swim in your own vomit, another key strategy is re-eating that vomit, as you have a limited supply per level. Ironically, instead of taking pills to fix stomach issues, pills in this game change the type of vomit you spew, which changes the approach of every level.

The bottom line. At heart,

Spewer is an incredibly addictive all-ages platformer that

JG<N<I

wants to waste your time as much

Eli Piilonen and Edmund McMillen

www.kongregate.com/

as you do, and is games/2DArray/spewer

Price: Free

completely worth

Requirements: Web browser with
a try during a Flash
break, especially Incredible production value
given the cost (free). Enough
given that it is
variation to stay entertained for 60
100 percent free.
levels, cross platform.