Cactus gets finished making a vegetable smoothie, he then takes out the trash and wraps a Christmas present for his mother. He thinks, "I have half an hour until my girlfriend comes over, what should I do with my time." He decides to surf the blogs where he notices that Kokoromi is having another contest so he checks his watch, shrugs his shoulders and makes a triptastic, shader-loaded, splendiferous little joygasm, composes an audio track for it, sneezes, and then hears his girlfriend buzz the door.
Simply entitled Gamma 4, Cactus's latest is an exercise in baroque minimalism, that is, the game uses one button (per contest rules), is fairly simple to play, and yet the sync of the music and the shiny, electric visual effects make it feel like a parade. Who would have thought that a game about dancing swastikas (originally a symbol of love) would be so upbeat and poppy? The game is being distributed only with donations, he can't release it for free until March per contest rules, so I'll tease you with some details. You have four symmetrical vectors that leave a trace, if they crash into a wall or a red beam they'll all explode, there are shiny boxes that you must collide with, collide with all of them to move to the next level, press space to change the vectors 45 degrees. Basic stuff, and once you play through the levels the game burns pretty fast, but the real sheen here is Cactus's expert use of the GameMaker engine's visual tool-set, the quadrangular symmetry, and of course, the burn effect where past traces layer onto the blackness of the background. This is the style the man is known for, and he delivers once again. For an outside observer, the game appears to be a procedural visualizer, like an interactive version of Electric Sheep, for the player you tend to focus your eye on one quadrant, I focused my eye on the upper-left, which on decompiling the game turned out to be the basis, the rest of the screen is extrapolated procedurally.
This game is worth the price of $whatever-you-want-to-pay. I dontated $5, which is the sweet spot for "premium" iPhone games, according to a lecture I attended, and this should most definitely be ported to iPhone. Cactus envy is trite but that doesn't stop me from feeling it.


















