Rescue: The Beagles

'Rescue: the beagles' is another randomly generated game passing under the guise of procedural. I should go into more detail at some point about the difference between the two of them, but for now, onto the game.

Rescue is a platformer at it's heart, wrapped around a kernel of advertising the inhumane treatment of animals. You know the type, like that game where you clear forests in south africa to grow burgers for mccdonalds and such. The thinly veiled criticism of society as a whole linked arbitarily to a fun little game.

In Rescue, you are given three paths to traverse, one at a time, and your goal is to collect all the beagles. Fairly simple, press up to jump, down to drop through to the next layer, and left and right to move approprately. Space shoots owls at marketing executives for points, too.

The three paths move randomly up and down relative to one another, within certain perameters. The top path is always between one height or another, as are the bottom, and middle restricted in the same way, they never touch. Beagles, enemies, and powerups - ropes, parachutes, and owls, all appear randomly on the right of the screen and move forever to the left. Miss a beagle, it's game over.

Really, the gameplay is simple, and while it's mostly fun there is one real problem. Some of the jumps are higher than your character can survive, but there's no real way of telling which ones short of memorizing the distance you can move. Coupled with the fact that you can move side to side at ludicrous speeds compared to falling, you really have to know exactly how to control your character to actually get a good score.

There are two big improvements that need to be made to this game to make it more than just another advergame. The first would be to remove the auto-scrolling. This would change the dynamic of the game a lot, but mostly it would make it so you're able to actually pay attention to what's on screen at a given time. Frankly, all I know at the rate the game currently moves is avoid big white spots, touch everything else. There's no strategy. The other change is make the differences between the layers more pronounced. When the fall would be lethal, make the ground rocky or something, it's not that hard. It'd stop players from rage-quitting when they;re just abou to collect the last beagle and move to the next randomly generated map.