Detonator
| Developer: Creative Vision | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Creative Vision | Sound: |
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| Year: 1987 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Brick breaker | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 2 alternating | Rating: |
4/10 | |
Detonator is a “beginner-friendly” brick breaker, painfully slow and played with a controller. Its unique feature is that bricks change colour multiple times upon contact with the ball before breaking, making levels drag on endlessly. On top of that, the paddle has a constantly depleting energy bar, indicated by the red shading at its edges: the darker the red, the closer you are to an explosion—and losing a life. Energy is restored whenever the ball hits the small ship on-screen. Don’t fret, though: the game grants an extra life every thousand points (and you’ll earn around 5,000 points per level!), so it’s honestly hard to lose. The real challenge, in fact, is staying awake until the end.
Update (18 years later):
What I described above is based on childhood memories, but it’s possible my version of the game was a … modified pirate copy. Yeah, I was four years old; maybe I got duped. As it stands, two (pirate) versions are floating around emulation sites:
- “Detonator (1987)(Creative Vision)[cr Blizzard]”: an upgraded version compared to the one I knew. It’s faster, hands out fewer extra lives, features background music and digitised voices. The brick layouts are different, the scrolling backgrounds vary (except for the first one), and it includes bonus 3D sequences (think a simplified HydroZone). A major difference: the ball no longer suffers from its annoying tendency to bounce vertically—a design sin for a brick breaker. For a few screenshots, click here, here, and here.
- “Detonator (1987)(Creative Vision)[h PHR-Crew]”: the childhood version I referenced in this post. The “h” for “hacked” leaves me scratching my head… I find it hard to believe anyone would hack a game just to remove features, and I doubt whoever writes “h” in these filenames knows more than I do about this obscure brick breaker. Still, I suspect it might be an unfinished build that leaked.
If this wasn’t the final version, I’ve unfairly trashed it. My sincerest apologies! Feel free to disregard the nonsense I’ve spouted. Who’s reading this far down the page anyway? Don’t you have better things to do?
[I case you didn’t, you may send me contrite tweets riddled with spelling mistakes, from Justing Bieber, Britney Spears, Kanye West or whoever, to help me translate this page more accurately. – Ed.]
If you’re curious about my version anyway, be aware that it suffers from a graphical glitch at startup, lasting about ten seconds. Just wait it out.
Better like this?
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