Sunday, October 31, 2010

Trick or Treat! Happy Halloween!

Today's 31st of October! And do you know what is special today! It's Halloween!

Pokémon celebrate Halloween too!

Halloween is an annual holiday observed on October 31, primarily in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holiday All Saints' Day, but is today largely a secular celebration.
Common Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, wearing costumes and attending costume parties, carving jack-o'-lanterns, ghost tours, bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted attractions, committing pranks, telling ghost stories or other frightening tales, and watching horror films.

A Jack-o-lantern which is carved on a pumpkin.
Halloween costumes are traditionally modeled after monsters such as ghosts, skeletons, witches, and devils. Over time, the costume selection extended to include popular characters from fiction, celebrities, and generic archetypes such as ninjas and princesses.

Candy Apple
Because the holiday comes in the wake of the annual apple harvest, candy apples (known as toffee apples outside North America), caramel or taffy apples are common Halloween treats made by rolling whole apples in a sticky sugar syrup, sometimes followed by rolling them in nuts.

!! HAPPY HALLOWEEN !!

Sunday, October 24, 2010

GBA - Drill Dozer

In-game logo of "Drill Dozer"
A nice pretty game I played many years ago on my emulator. This game is made by Game Freak (who also make Pokémon games).
The game is called "Drill Dozer" in English, and "Screw Breaker" (スクリューブレイカー 轟振どりるれろ Sukuryūbureikā Gōshin Dorirurero) in Japanese.

North American Boxart
As all can see, it is a Nintendo Game Boy Advance platformer. It released in 2005 in Japan, and later on 2006 in North America.


The in-game screenshot shows "Jill" falls down a cave.
The player is "Jill"  (ドリ・くるり Dori Kururi ?). She is the daughter of "Doug", the the leader of a bandit gang known as "The Red Dozers".

Screen-Shot shows drilling with "L" button.
Screen-Shot shows drilling with "R" button.
The drill is activated by simply pushing one of the shoulder buttons. The "R" button spins the drill forward and the"L" button spins it backwards.

The red-coloured box with a triangle holds a gear.
Red-gear in the box, here it is 2nd Gear.















2nd Gear, obtained.
Game tutorial showing how to use gears. "Right...now!, Press the "R" button!"
Some stages require you to use gears.
Each stage also contains two red gears that allow Jill to shift her Drill Dozer to the second and third gears. The higher the gear, the more powerful the Drill Dozer's drill is and the longer it spins.

Screen-shot showing that these enemies can be felled in one shot.


In each world, there is a mini-boss and a boss. All of the bosses can be defeated by using your drill in various ways. The only boss where the drill isn't used is in the final battle with "Croog". Your Drill Dozer falls apart, and Jill's only method of attack (and defense at that) is her fists. This final battle is the only battle where the boss does not have a health meter, as only one successful hit is required to defeat him.
When Jill's Drill Dozer runs out of health, the player receives a game over. He or she can resume the game at the beginning of the room the Drill Dozer was destroyed in by paying the shopkeeper fifty chips.

Drill Dozer was nominated as GBA Game of the Year by Nintendo Power, as well as Overall Game of the Year, and Best New Character (Jill) and Best Platformer throughout all systems for 2006. Of these, it won GBA Game of the Year as "NP's Pick". It was also runner-up for GameSpot's Game Boy Advance Game of the Year.

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