Every Extend
September 15th, 2004
A feature in this month’s Edge Magazine looks at freeware PC shoot ‘em ups (or ’schmups as the genre seems to be called now).
It’s the kind of article I would probably only have skimmed had my sister, Rachel not recently introduced me to the superb flash game, Zookeeper. A simple Tetris / Gems / Columns style puzzler, it is killer addictive. I’m strongly recommending you give it a miss if you value your free time (or indeed your ‘definitely not free, should be doing the decorating’ time).
And yet I cannot help tempting you with the fact that my hi-score is 32450. All gamers know that there is no more profound a motivator than the desire to beat your mates. Bring it on, people.
Anyway, because of Zookeeper my opinion of free games is pretty high right now, and so during my recent malaise I thought I’d check out a few of these Edge recommended ’schmups.
Every Extend was the first I tried, and I didn’t get any further.
It’s superb.
Very simple in principle, you position a bomb and then detonate it to "destory" as many enemies as possible, which then detonate more in a chain reaction that can go on-and-on. As the game itself charmingly puts it:
One day suddenly, you receive 12 UCHU- guided bombs. What do you do?
Suicidal explodion’ game with new feelings. Blow up self to involve enemies!
There’s more to it than that (much more - at least another full article) but I’ll leave it to you to discover.
Getting the game
The Every Extend homepage is in Japanese, and the download is in some wierd .lzh compressed format which I had to get a new util for, and then use the command-line to unzip (all of which added to the mystique). More easily, you can download a normal zip of Every Extend from the “Home of the Underdogs” site.
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to tell you my hi: 2662740. One of the many beauties of the game is that replays are available. Download a replay of my hi and drop it into your REPLAY folder to check out my best game.
Go to it. You will ignore the pain in your right hand (blasted cursor keys!) after about two hours.