Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Discovering Colors — Animals’ and ‘Asteroid Farmer’
Holiday over, year half over, time for fun.
Discovering Colors — Animals is an adorable colouring book application created by Frogames, the indie studio out of France that made Penguins Arena from earlier in the bundle. This time they’ve made an application geared to help teach the joy of vibrant expression. Or at least, how to match colours.
Equipped with 12 base drawings, players will select a drawing they find exciting and begin their mission to fill it with the coloured crayons at the bottom of the screen. Depending on the game mode, the player will either fill the designated area with a click, or free-paint their way to completion.
The ‘default’ game mode is called ‘Normal’, which has a speckle of the necessary colour on each location that needs colouring. The player will then match this colour, and it will ‘fill’ in the rest of the region — if the colours are all correct, a horn will sound and the picture will come to life. This is best for teaching the player how to match colours and what their colour looks like, further boosted by the optional ability to turn on voice commands that state what the colour is upon selection.
‘Free’ is very similar to Normal, but the speckle of colour is gone to give players free reign to go wild with creativity, bolstering understanding between how players feel about colours and their ability to use them freely. This mode comes with an extra button at the top to allow for the picture to come to life upon selection so that the player can feel that they finished the painting.
Finally we have my personal favourite and the ultimate challenge in ‘Painting’ as it completely matches a player’s ability to draw as they would in real life. The filling of the colours is gone, and now each click of the mouse places a small dab of colour. This gives full freedom to the player, letting them colour without any care for the lines themselves. If they want to paint the entire thing half yellow and half orange, they can. The only thing stopping them is that there is no button to bring the painting to life, which is understandable given the circumstances.
Aimed for children but perfect for any and all ages that may need reinforcement about colours, Discovering Colors is a great way of getting kids a colouring book without the possible mess that can follow. It is pure edutainment at its finest, with information for parents on how to help their child learn how to play the game, or ways they can help reinforce whomever is trying to learn. It may not be flashy, but it’s calming and fun — perfect for young ages and those who just need to unwind and colour in a lady bug pink.
Asteroid Farmer is a twist on a retro arcade classic by Allicorn, an indie developer based in the UK. Players have been hired as Asteroid Farmers to acquire valuable nuggets from large space rocks using lasers and bullets.
Players will enter each round with a set amount of shields and the goal of clearing out all of the asteroids while collecting as many of the nuggets as possible. Unfortunately the ship is a Tractor, not a fighter craft, so the player has no way of destroying the asteroids without some assistance. This comes in the form of the carrier ship, which flies across the screen carrying a random weapon used to destroy the asteroids. These weapons are then stored in the hardpoints on the map, and then continuously fire at the asteroids depending on the gun type, damage and range. The carrier will respawn with another weapon after the previous one flies off screen, so players can grab a new weapon to replace their older ones.
While waiting for the asteroids to be destroyed or a new weapon, players will be dodging asteroids and their subsequent shards. Movement is based on momentum gained from the thrusters. The more they are used the faster the player will go — and the harder it is to move with precision. Picking up the weapons from the carrier and dropping them off at the hardpoints requires the player to remain within a certain radius of the objective. This is extremely challenging if the player was moving quickly to begin with. Many times a shield will be lost just because the player will slide right on past a carrier and end up in the trajectory of an asteroid. This does not even take into account the aliens that will appear to attack the player or their hardpoint, adding even more danger to a simple slip up.
With many options to invoke the retro aesthetic like removing the colours, partnered with a fantastic soundtrack, Asteroid Farmer is a intriguing re-imagining of an old classic. It is hard to get the hang of due to how much the tractor will slide, but once the controls are mastered you’ll be farming your way to a massive high score as you plow through each level. If you enjoyed Asteroids but wanted more of a challenge, this might be a great option for you.
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Note: Asteroid Farmer is no longer available. The game’s former URL is below for archival purposes.
