On the Cheap – Bobbing

On the Cheap is Squinshee’s regular gander at inexpensive or free games.

Bobbing (iOS, Android)
Developer: Little Bobby Games
Price: $1

There’s nothing odd, at least to me, about reading Dante’s Inferno on a Kindle. The ability for new technology to adapt old art grants us easy access to a sprawling history of entertainment. Conversely, presenting new material through dated mediums sounds counterintuitive. For instance, listening to Skrillex on vinyl. Some people do it even though it seems physically impossible. You’re telling me that this Crosley can make my apartment go WUB-WUB with a needle scraping a spinning disk? I thought records were relegated to Frank Sinatra, like dubstep to mp3s.

Bobbing mixes vinyl, techno, and touchscreen gaming in a way that makes more sense to me. Players control a smiling, spiked Eskimo ball, endlessly running inside a hollowed out record. One button shifts gravity, letting you run on ceilings. The other is for switching complexion, since you need to match the blue and purple neon spotlights from imagined disco balls.

Wearing the right outfit to this whirling club is the least of Bobbing’s complexities. Flame panels, bouncy green lines, portals, and barbershop poles that reverse your direction create a variety of challenging scenarios. Determining the correct path in some stages takes additional brainpower, and perhaps too much of it. The right route is occasionally vague, so the trial and error process of finding it can be frustrating.

Frequent deaths don’t prevent the bumping Sigmao soundtrack from grooving. Instead, a slow-motion scratching effect punctuates your failure and captures the disk jockey tone. Bobbing makes vinyl and electronica seem made for each other.

Posted by Calvin Holt on April 3, 2013

https://squinshee.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/on-the-cheap-bobbing/