CrazyCrystals 1.1.0 review

CrazyCrystals is a new sliding puzzle game which tests your grey matter! The game is very simple to learn, all you have to do is slide the rows and columns to make groups of 5 or more crystals.

License: Shareware OS: Mac OS X File size: 572K Developer: F1 Software Buy Now Price: $12.00 Updated: 04 Oct 2006

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CrazyCrystals is a new sliding puzzle game which tests your grey matter!

The game is very simple to learn, all you have to do is slide the rows and columns to make groups of 5 or more crystals. With over 10 different crystals available, as you progress, the game quickly becomes more and more challenging.

Suitable for all ages. This is the first beta release for Mac.

Limitations:
The trial version of CrazyCrystals has many restrictions. Buying the game will unlock all of the game restrictions, providing you with unlimited gamepla

What's New:
Completely New High-Score System! - We have added a brand new high score system to the game, what will allow us to record much more detail into the high score table. It's a little more flexible, and allows us to store multiple banks of tables. This means we can have tables for each game type and difficulty level. These new changes are currently working in this new version. Score table is saved as one large file for easy management, and is compatible with PC & Mac data files (meaning you can take a Mac high score table and load it into the PC, and vice versa).
Improved Scoring Code - We have improved the overall score checking code along with the new format, and fixed one or two old problems like not always being able to enter your name. We also added small icons to the screen to tell you which platforms the score were acheived on, and the highscores menu now scrolls the top 50 best CrazyCrystals players. This data will be more varied once we start uploading user highscore tables. We also fixed the bugs that caused the name to be filled up with characters if you had been pressing keys on the keyboard prior to that screen appearing.
New Game Modes! - I have added two new game types to the game. These are challenge games, one runs for 5 minutes, and the other runs at 10 minutes. The objective of each is to play the game as normal, however when you score points, no additional time is added to the bar at the bottom. The skill is to play as fast and as efficient as possible to score as many points in your alotted time limit. It's already proving quite addictive with my testers!
If no existing high score tables are found, the game will create a set of default scores to use. This normally happens the first time the game is ran, unless you copied a score table before-hand. # Game now correctly goes into PAUSE mode when the ESC key is pressed, and remove the crystals from the gamew grid to prevent people from cheating! (Sorry, Mike!) A simple screensaver shows falling crystals, and the effect will be improved in later versions of the game.
Final game score is shown on the screen when you are entering your name into the high score table, and some formatting errors have been corrected.
Upon starting a new game, the ready box will show you the lowest score you need to beat from all applicable score tables, to be able to get your name into the score table. Ready box also reminds you that you can press the ESC key during a game to bring up the ingame menu.
Some players reported a small delay at game over of about a second before the crystals completely fell (they stopped part-way through the animation). This should be fixed, though I could never replicate the problem to fully test it. Let me know if it's fixed!
Re-worked in-game sound a little. I swapped some sound effects aound, and added a few new ones including starting a new game, game over, and a couple of hidden ones =) Replaced new crystal sound with a nice sonar effect as several players reported they didn't like the current sound.
Target icon is blitted with transparency so it blends better with it's background.
Adjusted crystal sensitivity, so the crystals are less inclined to move in the wrong direction if the mouse isn't moved in completely a straight line. Still experimenting with the code here to get the best results, so let me know if this improves for you or not.
Trimmed some un-necessary code out of the program to keep the file size down to a minimum on the Mac.
Optimized several rendering functions to squeeze a few extra frames per second on older macs and PC's.
Touched up some of the ingame graphics files with a few extra bits and pieces, fixed the logo for the ingame background screen.

Requirements:
CarbonLib for Mac OS 9.