Jeff Minter, the creative genius behind Gridrunner, Tempest 2000 and the underrated Xbox Live title, Space Giraffe, has taken his talents to the App Store. His latest effort, Minotaur Rescue, is just as crazy as previous accomplishments, but it’s one of those games that, when everything clicks, you won’t be able to put it down. If you are looking for a little action this Sunday afternoon this game is worth a look. Find out why, after the break.
The game is basically a trippy combination of Asteroids and Space War! played on the screen of the iPhone or iPad and marks the first in a series of Llamasoft games that are part of the “Minotaur Project,” an effort by the developer to release numerous titles featuring retro gameplay, progressing forward from the Atari VCS aesthetic to the VIC 20, Commodore 64, and beyond.
Dripping with 80s nostalgia, this challenging gem tasks you with guiding a ship (equipped with a Mark Super Seven Quantum Drive) through space, where the goal is to grab Minotaurs floating by while at the same time preventing them and large asteroids from traveling into the sun, which transforms into a black hole if it consumes too many objects. Meanwhile, flying saucers appear at random to make the game even crazier.
It comes as a Universal app that natively supports both the iPhone and the iPad, consists of an active starfield play area with a sun at the center. In its core gameplay mode, you control an ever-firing ship that can fly about this starfield (wrapping at the edges) and is affected by the intense gravitational pull of the aforementioned sun. And so, too, are the asteroids closing in from the edges. Your job is to blast apart these asteroids (as opposed to slamming into them), some of which contain minotaurs that must be rescued before they drift into the sun. If too many asteroids drift into the sun, it will turn into a black hole…which is bad. The closer to the sun a minotaur gets before you rescue him, the more points you gain for said rescue. And, the more minotaurs you rescue and the closer you are to the sun, the faster your auto-fire tosses out rounds. Just to keep you fully on your toes, the occasional enemy saucer passes through (and some are tiny), shooting at you and dropping mines.
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