Laser Fry

Laser Fry has the feel of a twitchy 80s arcade game.  I can and have gotten into those.  Most of them are based on existing games.  We Are Cubes is like a mixture of Tempest and Buster Bros.  DecimationX3 was a souped-up version of Space Invaders.  There’s been new takes on Defender, Contra, Frogger, Qix, Pac-Man.. pretty much every vintage coin-op under the sun.  Laser Fry is apparently an original idea.  You’re a dude, and there are lasers and balls.  Avoid the balls, or destroy the balls with the lasers.  Just don’t be standing in the path of the laser when you activate it.  Basic stuff they teach you at Testicle Removal School*.

I figured when I started Indie Gamer Chick, I would be neck-deep in original game concepts.  That’s not the case, of course.  Entirely original concepts are as rare as a Yeti.  Developers, even gutsy ones, tend to stick to what they know works, only making minor tweaks on established formulas.  Still, the occasional game centered around a new idea does pop up from time to time.  Such is the case here.  I asked around, and nobody had played anything like it (there were some games on the Commodore 64 that looked similar but turned out to be much different).  Great!  So how does this original idea fare?

No, you can’t make sense of this. I think you have a better chance of deciphering the Voynich manuscript.

Not so good.  The main gameplay problem is the background is simply too noisy.  On easy mode, you only have to keep track of the yellow balls and yellow lasers.  This by itself is a decent challenge, especially once the action speeds up.  On higher difficulties, you have three different colors of lasers, three colors of balls, and lots of background shit for those to bleed into.  If you can actually follow the action, your super vision could probably be put to better use in the fields of espionage or Lex Luthor foiling.  Despite decent enough play control, the action in this game is incomprehensible.

But, even if it wasn’t, I don’t think the concept lends itself well to a good game.  That’s the biggest sin Laser Fry commits: it simply is not fun, and probably doesn’t have the potential to ever be fun.  So, like most original ideas that flop, I’ll chalk Laser Fry up to being a worthy experiment that produced an undesirable product.  Sometimes you simply can’t know what will and won’t work until you try it.  It takes a brave person to begin with, who sees a void in innovation and says “I’m going to give this a shot!”  Like an egghead with a chemistry set.  Sometimes you accidentally cure cancer, and sometimes you blow yourself up.

Laser Fry was developed by GGGames

80 Microsoft Points thought the game would involve one of these and a random dude’s hair in the making of this review.

*More commonly called UCLA