Blowing up Asteroids in Bounce Arcade

I'm continuing to play a little Bounce Arcade here and there, and lately it seems to be my go-to, just messing around VR pinball experience. It's pretty light and super easy to get into when I just want to play and not think too much. 

Since the last time I posted about the game, I've been putting up some great scores on all the game modes. Since I mostly talked about Gunpowder Gulch before, I thought I'd talk a little about the next step up in difficulty, Asteroid Outpost.

Time to play pinball in space!

As of this posting, I managed to barely slip myself into the top 10 for the leaderboards.

Diamond Rank, baby! Yeah!

In Asteroid Outpost, your playing field is very much inside the engine room of a spaceship.  In phase one of the board, your objective is to hit the objects lit by crackling electricity and then shoot them down into the engine core to charge it up.  After you completely charge the engine, a secondary objective appears.

The four secondary objectives are as follows:

- Shoot the cannons -- basically target one of the cannons and then shoot the ball between cannons until you've hit them all and shoot it down a nearby tube.  This is by far the easiest of the secondary objectives.

- Target the side chamber -- When the side chamber opens up, it's a bouncy mad-house of point generation. Once you hit all the bumpers inside the side chamber, shoot the lit up tube nearby and you're done.

- Charge up the spinners -- At the top right and top left of the playing field are two spinners. As you shoot the spinners, they charge the left and right sides of the top of the engine. Once you've charged both of them up, shoot the lit up tube to complete the secondary objective.

- Light all the arrows -- Arrows run from the corners of the playing field. Sometimes these arrows are pointing toward the center, and sometimes these arrows are pointing away from the center.  Run the ball down all three arrows in a row, and they'll light green to indicate success. Once you've lit up all the arrows, shoot the ball into the engine and you'll be done with the secondary objective.

After you finish a secondary objective, the hull of the ship peels back and three large asteroids float out in space. You need to use your pinball (and other power-up balls) to destroy these asteroids and reveal the golden nuggets inside them. 

Time to play Asteroids! (Just not on the 2600)

Shoot the golden nuggets into the collection tubes while keeping your ball in play and eventually, you'll win the third objective and light up a part of the engine. Do this four times and your ship will jump to lightspeed so you complete the entire game loop.

To make things more difficult, enemy laser cubes will activate and target your game paddles with lasers each time you enter the asteroid field. If a laser hits your game paddle, it'll deactivate for a few seconds leaving you extremely vulnerable to losing your ball.

To make things EVEN MORE DIFFICULT, after you complete the game loop once, you'll be given a multiball in the asteroid field and have to keep them ALL in play or you'll have to restart. It gets to be a crazy frantic mess of balls, powerups, golden nuggets, and laser cubes you have to keep track of.

So there you go, that's the Asteroid Outpost game in Bounce Arcade. To be honest, of all the game modes (excluding the tutorial), the Asteroid Outpost is my least favorite playing field. Its mini-games just aren't as exciting as the other three modes, and the game loop is a little monotonous. 

It feels like there's a missed opportunity to bring more sci-fi flair into the playing field! There should be more to the vastness of space than just asteroid mining. Right?! I mean, can I please have some kind of alien contact, ship repair, or planetary landing moments mixed into the asteroid mining? It really does feel like there could have been just a bit more sci-fi fun included. Even just one alien crawling around inside the hull of the ship would have been enough.

That all said, it's not a horrible board . . . just not my favorite. Happy to be in the top ten for now!

Happy Dueling!

Bouncing up the Leaderboards in Bounce Arcade

I was browsing Facebook the other day when an old KingsIsle friend of mine (Erik McKinney) announced that the new company he was working for had just released a new VR game called Bounce Arcade. Erik was the environment artist for the game, so I jumped on the opportunity to purchase it and give it a spin.

Easy there cowpoke, it's time for some Gunpowerder Gulch!

Honestly, my loyalties to Erik aside, it's a pretty fun game, and I love the concept behind it. Basically, you as the player are the paddles sitting in the pinball machine hole, and you need to block the ball from going through. Just keep smacking that ball and don't let it get past you.

That's the basics, but like most pinball machines, there's more to the game loop than just that. Just like in regular pinball, certain targets and objectives are scattered throughout the field in front of you. They'll be highlighted in yellow to give you an indication that you need to target it. After hitting them, a secondary objective lights up, leading to a big event.  In regular pinball, that's usually a multiball situation.

Cannons are lit and it's time to go for a minigame star!

To simulate "tilting" the table, you can bend a ball in the direction of targets and even activate a power-up to suck a ball into your paddles and redirect it at a target. Unlike regular pinball, however, what tends to open up in Bounce Arcade is a minigame! 

Bending a ball toward the town bell

For example, in the Gunslinger game after, hitting the targets to charge up the town hall's meter, all the cannons will point toward the bell above the town hall and the doors to the town hall will open to reveal an icon. Hit all the cannons and the game will pause as you play whatever mini-game is associated with the icon on the town hall doors.  In a couple of those instances, your paddles will turn into guns and you'll participate in a shoot out ala the game police trainer (shooting the bad guys, avoiding the town citizens) or hit the dynamite barrels before they touch the ground . . . stuff like that.

Shooting barrels out of the sky

Once you win a mini-game, you'll earn a star for the level.  What happens when you fill all the stars?!?! Man, I don't know yet!!!  I'm getting close though.  I managed to get 3 of 4 stars on the gunslinger level and set a pretty decent score though. I'm definitely getting better at the game with each play.

The only complaint I've heard from around the Discord channels is that there isn't enough content, which to be honest is really hard to reach when making a $20 game, from personal experience. On the other hand, I love the potential they've created for this game, and I hope it does well enough that it will become a lovable DLC beast similar to Walkabout Minigolf.

. . . And to me, that's what you need to look at for VR games at that price point. Walkabout is such a good model for games like this, in fact, if I were a Designer for Velan I'd push to mirror more of the good things in that game that make it feel like there's more bang for the buck.  Let's take a look at that.

1- Each level of Walkabout Minigolf has an easy and a hard mode. Bounce should do this as well.  One time while playing Bounce, my controllers bugged out and my paddles no longer extended out in front of me in space, instead they were stuck nearer to my hands. It made me jump around and stand up really exercising to hit the ball. Although it was a bug, it's a rather easy way to make a hard mode for the game. 

2- Account rewards from hidden minigames make Walkabout pretty genius. In the easy mode, you collect balls that you can use while you play.  I really think you could do the same thing with the pinball in Bounce. You play the game with an ordinary-looking ball that ignites with an effect once in a while.  Just change the look of this ball as a reward for doing a hidden objective on the easy mode.  For hard mode in Walkabout, you have a fox hunt minigame.  When you complete the fox hunt, you earn a new golf club.  Again, I'm using paddles that look the same in every level . . . what if I could earn special "gunslinger" paddles (perhaps the edge looks like a rope lasso?) by hitting a certain point threshold in a hard mode of the Gunslinger map. It'd be great!

I will say that if you are prone to seasickness or don't have your VR legs yet, this is a really good starter game. You can play it just by looking in one direction. It's basically a 180 game instead of 360. 

I may highlight individual boards here on the blog in the future, but I've played enough of Bounce Arcade that it felt like I needed to give it a shout-out. It's a great game with a lot of potential. (Also, Erik is amazing and you should check out his cool environmental artwork)

Happy Dueling!