Review of Bossinabox
Installation:
Today’s game is another small download at only just over 4Mb with a final installation size of 6.62Mb. I think the download speed from the college server where it’s coming from has been capped as it seemed to take forever to download on what would normally take around 6 to 8 seconds for me - it took over a minute.
With a decent installer included, the installation of today’s freeware game was as easy as crushing a grape; :) though you must select the option for installing a shortcut on the desktop during the set up of the game. (the start up shortcut is already selected for you)
Please follow the link below for the download link which Freeware Fan has posted in day five of his freeware extravaganza. :)
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/2368?replies=4
The Game:
Here’s what the read me downloaded with the game had to say about Bossinabox, and I quote:
Bossinabox is a fast-paced arcade-style shooter based on the idea that boss fight’s are awesome. Your goal is to annihilate the boss as he splits into an army of mini-bosses. Take too much damage and you will be obliterated in a blinding flash of misery.
Unfortunately (initially) I wasn’t able to see the game field, only the life bar at the bottom appeared, which mysteriously reduced quickly through green, yellow and red, at which point it said "WARNING". Then a message flashed up on the screen saying "You Lose!" I was looking forwards to trying this game as I do love fighting bosses at the end of what sometimes are tedious rounds just to get to the boss. Unfortunately I couldn’t see any options menu either, otherwise maybe I’d have been able to adjust something. I’m running a dual core Athlon 6400 (2 x 3.2GHz) cpu, and an NVidia 8800GTS 640Mb Graphics card, with 4Gb of memory (3.6GB utilized), maybe it’s the dual core? Looks like it is as it wouldn’t play on either of the other two dual's I have, one other showed exactly the same problem, that is no graphics apart from the life bar and the other one came up with an error message saying "Xinput1_2.dll" Both the ones that showed no graphics are using 8 series graphics cards (8800GXS and 2 x 8600GT). The one that showed the error message uses 7 series (7900GS). Anyway, I’ll try running this on one of my non dual core computers and see what happens…...
Yessss! It worked. Though I’m not able to take any screen shots. The system I’m running it on is a Athlon 2.2G cpu, with an NVidia 7600GS 128Mb video card and 1.5Gb of RAM. I’d appreciate any feedback from community members who are running dual core and 8 series graphics cards to see if they have similar issues. I think I’ll contact the developers over this as well. Anyway, after all that (four installations later) I’ll do a 'short' review of the actual game.
Apart from the initial Digipen splashscreen (the college domain and/or collective name of the developers), you are taken straight into the games arena with a large banner across the top proclaiming "Bossinabox", and two buttons controlled by the left and right arrow keys and the enter button. There are no other menu buttons, and no options, apart from these two, which are the play and exit keys. The arrow keys are used to select whether to play or exit and the enter button to commit the command. Once in game you can pause by using the Esc key. I’ve detailed the control keys and mouse controls below using those from the read me file that you are either able to read upon first installing the game (good idea) or accessing later by going into the games folder, which by default is installed into the following path:
C:\Program Files\Bossinabox\
I checked the games folder and found two png images, which I captured from Photoshop because I’d forgotten how to convert to other formats, lol. I was going to upload them to my photobucket account to show here; then had the bright idea to Google 'Bossinabox', though I thought there would be precious few or no hits, as this title seems really obscure, but I was wrong. There was an excellent selection which reminded me a lot of the graphics from previous giveaways such as Bullet Candy and Immortal Defense with respect to the glowing and very psychedelic colors. Here’s the link to the Googled page:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=Bossinabox&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
There’s also pictures of the some of the developers, some cool looking dudes I must say. :)
Anyway, my impressions of the game:
Wow! What an unusual shooter. Your control keys move a crosshair in all directions around a cube, that’s all six faces of the cube. Within the cube is trapped a weird looking boss, not dissimilar to a squid, but made up of globules of a black substance with red light reflecting off of it. Shooting the creature will break it up into smaller versions of itself until…. Well I never got that far on my first three attempts. I’m off to try it out on the other dual processor’s to see if it’s the graphic’s card that’s causing the problem or the CPU.
Controls:
Movement Keys………………..WASD or IJKL or arrow keys
Shoot…………………………...Left Mouse Button, Space Bar, or Enter
Pause or Exit…………………...Esc
You can also use the Xbox controller for Windows which according to the developer is the best way to play this game. Damn (I wanted to use a better expletive here, but thought better of it) I don’t have one of those yet. :(
Music/soundtrack
Being such a small sized game you wouldn't expect much in the way of sound effects and music. Well a third of the installed game is taken up by the theme tune; I love the theme tune called 12th Warrior. (It's a wav file, so I'm going to copy it into the miscellaneous folder of my music collection), the instruments are a little (no scrub that, a lot like "80's" era music, electronic sounding, but the melody is there and it's sort of haunting (too me at least), and despite the retro feel to it I still love the tune. The sound effects are also okay. Most are ogg files but the jaguar sound is also a wav file eeeyowwww, so you can check it out if you wish.
Conclusion
This is a very simple game, no frills attached, but one I found a computer it worked on I was hooked. What a fantastic find FreewareFan. How on earth do you do it????? Anyway, I suspect it’s a long hard toil in front of the computer that brings these pearls of excellence to your attention. All I can say is thank you for finding it. As yet I’m still on the first level so don’t know whether there are different bosses. From the screenshots it looks like there isn’t, but I may be wrong (I hope) I love the pyrotechnic/psychedelic lightshow as you destroy bits or get hit yourself. I have to give this a good 7.5 out of 10. I know it’s virtually the same as that fantastic freeware racing game Trackmania Nations which has so much more, and in some way seems absurd, but I‘m not comparing game against game, but primarily the game play. If it’s fun and re-playable then it gets a good score from me. The simplicity of this particular game and my love of color helps to score it high.
System Requirements:
512 MB RAM
5 MB Free hard drive space
2.1 GHz Processor
DirectX 9.0c or better
Pixel Shader 2.0 or better
That last prerequisite is odd for such a game IMO and will unfotunately probably exclude some people from enjoying this game. I have a spare graphics card with pixel shader 2 - an NVidia FX5200 128Mb RAM, AGP which, if you can find my Email to contact me, over on the games giveaway comments section (most have been deleted as it's the policy not to give out Emails) you can have it for free. First come first served though I do have an earlier ATI card, but I'm not sure whether that supports pixel shader 2, {can't remember the model number, I think it's a 9400 but I may be wrong} therefore anyone wanting or needing a graphics card that's reasonable can also have that one. It's got 128Mb of memory and fits an AGP socket as well (most new motherboards now use PCI Express for graphics cards, but some manufacturers are still using AGP or a combination of both) I'd rather give them to someone who doesn't already have a graphics card, especially someone who can't afford to update their computer)
Developers Website:
http://www.digipen.edu/GameGallery/websites/BossInABox/
p.s.
Freeware Fan, while searching for stuff related to Bossinabox I came across several freeware games that look pretty good, but I don’t want to spoil the daily freeware fest that you are serving up by posting details of one that may be part of your list. So could you tell me whether any of the games you have in store for us mere mortals include the following themes?
Submarines
Ducks
Squirrels
Fish
Angels (well something with angel wings at least)
If so please let me know. I’ll wait till you’ve given me the go ahead on these. Also any more games from the developers of today’s game??? Ta man
WR out till tomorrow.
