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by RevStu (October 4th, 2010 at 10:46 am)

No.1: ElectroMaster

One of the less-welcome aspects of the App Store is how hard it is for good new games to get noticed. There’s a very small window of opportunity on release, and if you’re not fortunate enough to pick up some coverage and/or word of mouth straight away, you’ll be swept away un-noticed in the avalanche of the next day’s apps and by the gaming media’s neurotic obsession with the new.

One of the reasons we started Podgamer was that we didn’t want to see so many great games be lost to posterity, and their creators go unrewarded for their excellent work, because nobody knew they existed. So as well as exciting new releases, you’ll find us regularly covering older titles that slipped undeservedly under the radar for one reason or another, and the first example is the fantastic ElectroMaster.

At first glance ElectroMaster (£1.79/$2.99) looks like a fairly standard Robotron knockoff, albeit one executed in particularly high-class retro style complete with 8-bit pixel graphics and sound, fake scanlines and a coin-op boot-up sequence. But while its DNA is indeed pure arcade, it’s made of more than just Robotron.

The core gameplay mechanism of ElectroMaster is in fact more or less lifted from the “Beam” attack of R-Type. Your unnamed character moves perpetually around the screen, always headed towards wherever your finger last tapped. If you hold your finger down, however, she moves more slowly and charges up a laser beam attack, which lasts longer the longer you charge it. Release your finger and the beam fires, and can be directed in the same way you steer the character. The more enemies you hit with one blast, the more points each successive hit is worth.

So straight away, the classic arcade play balance is in place. To get big scores you have to place your character in more danger, by having her move more slowly, remain vulnerable to attack and hold her fire for longer. (You get three lives per stage, but that’s not as generous as it sounds – you can easily lose them all in five seconds.) But while the mere act of playing is immediately joyful, the more you play the game the more its incredible strategic and tactical depth reveals itself, like peeling away layers of some sort of enormous 3D virtual onion.

Some of it’s pretty obvious, like the different enemies you start to encounter after the first few waves and the new weapons you’re given after every 10 games. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and the later ones aren’t necessarily better than the default beam or the three-way laser that’s unlocked first, so you can pick whichever suits your personal play style best. (While I tend to stick to the Trident most of the time, the Tackle beam is brilliant for certain stages, and also the most fun.)

But there’s also the way you can effectively choose your own goals. There are two modes: the optimistically-labelled “Story” mode and a “Survival”  game that’s basically exactly the same except with a fixed 10 lives instead of three that replenish every wave. But you also get five difficulty settings, which ramp up the number of enemies dramatically and also offer the chance to achieve much more impressive ratings on the single all-difficulties OpenFeint high-score leaderboard. (I did a quick test, and clearing the first three waves on Easy without taking a hit notched me a modest 816,700 points, while doing the same at the hardest “Phantasm” setting racked up a rather beefier 5.5 million.)

There are lots of other leaderboards besides the main high-score one, too. As well as a local offline table, the game’s OpenFeint rankings include the most waves cleared in Survival mode, the most bonus fruits collected in a single game, the highest combo achieved, the highest number of enemies killed and more. And if you don’t care about other people, you can play Story mode like a puzzle game by cranking up the difficulty – by the time you get to the late-20s waves at Lunatic or Phantasm you’ll have to develop a full multi-part battle plan to have any chance of conquering a single stage. (You get infinite continues in Story mode, with your score resetting to zero each time.)

In other words, ElectroMaster is a far more sophisticated game than it seems to be at first glance. (And we haven’t even gone into the shmup-inspired scoring – we’ll save that for a full-on playing guide someday.) Yet all the sophistication is cleverly hidden below the surface and within the design, not dumped onto the unfortunate player’s shoulders. You never have to learn any new controls – the entire game is always played with a single finger – and you never have to do anything except run around the screen avoiding and shooting enemies. But within that simple framework you’ll be constantly making decisions, balancing your play between survival and scoring, and learning new tricks and techniques. Just like its most obvious inspiration, this is a game you could play for 20 years without getting bored.

(If you ever find yourself getting too good there’s even a secret not-very-hidden expert mode, and lucky iPad owners get special two-player and Versus modes too, though I’m not one and therefore can’t tell you what they’re like.)

£1.79 is an ambitious price to be charging in the App Store for an original debut game with no Lite version from an unknown developer (although we grabbed it at launch for 59p, because we can spot a beauty a mile off), and judging by the leaderboards fewer than 1000 people have coughed up the readies. But ElectroMaster is worth every penny – it’s still less than Spectrum budget games went for in 1985, for Heaven’s sake – and if we can’t at least double that for them then we might as well shut up shop right now. Make us proud, viewers.

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