Snake

A groggy remake

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Snake was always one of my favorite old-school arcade games. Quick reflexes and some intuition were all you needed to become the biggest snake around. Avoiding the walls and making a maze out of yourself to get around in cramped areas were part of the hectic gameplay. This Snake, however, has been restricted to three levels and given an immense cutback in speed. Think of it as Snake on Prozac.

Instead of being limited to the four main keyboard directions, you can move 360 degrees by simply moving left and right with the arrows while your snake continues forward. In each level you have eat a set amount of dots, which make your snake longer. Every so often you’ll eat a blue dot that gives you a “bonus.” Bonuses though usually just make it harder for you to play, with effects like shaking the screen or scrolling clouds over top of it. The main downer here is that the game is just painfully slow. Collecting 25 dots in a level can take minutes of just slowly sliding your snake around the screen. The dots you have to eat only increase with the level. Grabbing a dot can be tricky every once in a while but there’s almost always plenty of room to navigate your snake around the screen. I was actually happy to get the rocket boost powerup (supposed to make it harder to play) because it almost brought the game up to playable speed. Don’t even ask about the snail powerup.

The backgrounds are very nice but all three levels look exactly the same, just being slight variations on each other. The red-dot snake also looks a little out of place on the lush forest backgrounds but it would be pretty hard to make a fluid-moving snake that looked real. Without killing the processor at least. Music is campy but bearable.

Once you pass level 3 you can submit for high scores, if you can stand to make it that far that is. You even get five lives to make it through three levels. It’s possible to become disoriented sometimes but the biggest killer in this game is monotony. While moving my snake around in level 3 I started to trance out a little and ended up running into the wall a few times. Snake isn’t too bad of a game, but the speed factor really kills it. Give this one to Grandma.

Click here to play Snake

Graphics	Sound	Gameplay /Control	Presentation	Overall
8	7	5	7	6
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