Fall of the Mutant Tomatoes

The Fall of the Mutant Tomatoes: at a first glance it may sound like a clone of cult horror farce Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but don't be fooled so easily. No, “The Fall of the Mutant Tomatoes”, by Kyuran's World, is a puzzle game. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Namco's arcade puzzler Mr. Driller, FotMT has you, a mutant tomato, digging through row after row of brightly-colored blocks, trying desperately to stay alive. But does this game push through the ranks of the millions of Pocket PC puzzle games, or does it just fall down to the bottom of the barrel?

GETTING STARTED:

GAMEPLAY:

The concept of Fall of the Mutant Tomatoes is very simple. You, a mutant tomato, are for some reason descending through layer after layer of brightly-colored blocks, trying to get as far down as you can for the largest score. Blocks of the same color will group together to form clusters, and while this may seem unimportant, it ends up playing a key function in strategy. And while all of this is happening you have to keep collecting air capsules lest you run out of oxygen. You have to dig through the colored blocks while avoiding the white, popcorn-shaped bricks (they take away 20% of your air supply, while the capsules add 20% to it). The concept may be simple, but in actuality the game requires a lot of multitasking. As you destroy bricks, others fall down, starting chain reactions. So not only do you have to keep digging down while searching for oxygen capsules to stay alive, but you also need to watch out for falling bricks!

Overall I found the game to be loads of fun. It relies equally on reflexes and wit, is easy to learn, and though there is no real 'goal', so to speak, I still find myself going back and playing to try to beat my previous high score. The only thing that bugs me about the game mechanics is that you only have one life. It doesn't matter how many points you have or how long you've been playing, if you make one tiny mistake and get hit by a falling block, you die. Game over. Finito. In the original Mr. Driller, you had a number of lives so getting hit once wasn't the absolute end of the world.

There is a difficulty toggle on the options menu that lets you pick between Easy and Hard modes (Hard is the default), and selecting Easy slows the game down a lot, which I just didn't find to be that useful. There is also supposed to be an Internet high score list – and it looks like it would be fairly easy to use, as the in-game high score list contains cryptic alphanumeric keys that one would presumably enter into a website – but alas, I could not find the advertised “Internet hall of fame”. Similarly, there was no game documentation in sight which, while not at all essential for such a straight-forward game, could have cleared up issues such as the missing web high score list.

The controls are very straight forward: the control pad controls your direction, the first button to the right of it makes the tomato dig in the direction you are facing, and pressing the Action button in the center of the d-pad pauses the game. Though it would be nice to be able to configure the controls (I would prefer to have a pause button that you won't inadvertently hit while playing), I have no real complaints with the controls as they are.

GRAPHICS:

The graphics in Fall of the Mutant Tomatoes are simplistic, yet nice to look at. The brightly-colored blocks are, well, brightly colored and crisp. There is a lot to look at on the screen, and everything just blends together perfectly. Blocks shake as they are about to fall down, the tomato pushes against the blocks to destroy them, and the crinkly little white things that are bad to destroy shrink into smaller, more crinkly little white things as you attack them. There is also an optional background you can enable from the options menu that also looks fine. Overall, there are no real complaints or wishes from me in the visuals department.

 

SOUND:

Though the build I ended up using had no sound, I was able to listen to the music and sound effects on one of the less-than-playable versions I received. The one track I heard (I do not know if there are any more) was a techno-ey piece, which despite my initial doubts as to how it would fit it actually seemed to work quite well with the game. The sound effects were fine, with appropriate noises for destroying blocks and trying to destroy the bad ones. The only sound that seemed out of place was the air horn that played upon collecting an air capsule.

CONCLUSION:

The Fall of the Mutant Tomatoes is a solid puzzle game, and stands heads and shoulders above the thousands of Tetris and Bejeweled clones out there. Sure, there are a few bugs, but generally those can be overlooked. Unfortunately, what can NOT be overlooked is the lack of support for WM2003 devices, which are becoming more and more common and includes pretty much anything made within the last year. I feel as though I cannot give this game a higher rating because of this flaw, even though it clearly deserves it; I will gladly give this game the rating it deserves when and if an update is released. For those few of you with ARM or X-Scale Pocket PCs that are not running on the new operating system, I recommend that you try this. But it seems that everybody else is plain out of luck.

You can buy Fall of the Mutant Tomatoes for $12.99 for all ARM or XScale Pocket PCs running PPC2002, and it takes up 128kb of storage space.

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