| There
are some games in my collection
I hardly ever play. Some of them are simply bad games I wish I'd
never bought or downloaded, but I hang on to them through some
sort of misplaced loyalty. Others I'm just crap at, so I load
them from time to time just to see if I've got any better.
Still more don't get played often because they
require some form of ancient hardware to be dragged out of the
loft. And then there are the ones that I limit my exposure to
deliberately, because they tend to eat up entire afternoons in
a blink. Pipe Dream is one of those games.
It’s not an original concept - in fact
it’s a direct rip off of Pipemania, which I played to death
on the ST. Simply stick bits of pipe down on a grid to make a
continuous tube for an unspecified fluid to run through. There’s
end to aim for – just an increasing number of sections through
which you have to direct the gunge, with the occasional pre-placed
pipe segment to use or solid block to avoid.
No bad guys to shoot, no real mysteries to solve.
Just plonking down pipes. It’s not a even very good interpretation
of the original – there's no sound, no clock, crude graphics…
But, by God, it’s addictive.
The arcade version. That crazy
liquid just doesn’t care where it goes…
Plenty of other diversions from mundane reality
sit on my hard drive, but this is the one I have to steer clear
of if I want to get anything done when I’m working from
home. Not the games I've paid for. Not the games I've spent hours
downloading over a painfully slow modem. The one that I found
on a pirate cd of Spectrum "roms".
I can see those pipes when I close my eyes.
I find myself driving to work thinking of more and more elaborate
networks of connections and cross-overs. I shout advice at the
telly on a Saturday night when some quiz show is on and the contestants
can't work out a puzzle based on similar mechanics. But most of
all I want to sneak back upstairs and try again to beat that high
score.
SIMONB, January
2004.
RODENT CASH RATING -
£0.00. It’s free. FREE, I SAY!
 "Not
duff. Plumb"
____________________________________________________________________
Things to 'Make' and 'Do'.
All your generic pipe woes resolved.
Dream Dictionary. ‘Interpret’
your clammy sleep-thinks.
Find a registered
UK plumber quick ‘n’ easy. Eight sugars, please,
luv.
Why cigars are for puffs not puffers –
by the Online Pipe-Smoker’s
Organisation.
____________________________________________________________________ |
