"Excellent Old School Game"

It is utterly amazing how a few kilobytes on a floppy disk can provide so many hours of blissful entertainment. Snakebyte may not be perfect, but it's about as close are you are going to get.

The premise is simple. You control a snake (two parallel green lines), and you must eat apples (red plus signs) that appear randomly on the board. The snake moves at a fairly high speed, and only your skillful timing will prevent it from crashing into a wall or its own self.

Each level features some sort of obstacle course. When you begin a level, an apple will appear at a random location in the map. Once you eat it, your snake grows in length, increases in speed, and another apple appears. Once you have eaten ten apples in this manner, a gate will open, and you can proceed to the next level. The early levels are simple, and they are an opportunity to get a feel for the game. As you proceed, the obstacles become more complicated and difficult to maneuver.

To make matters worse, you are constantly in battle with the clock. Should you take too long in eating an apple, three more will appear randomly on the screen, and you must eat 13 to complete the level. Every time your clock runs out, three apples are added to the total you must collect. Should be avoided at all costs.

You have more than once chance, of course. You start with three lives, and you gain one life for every level you complete. Build up lives in the early levels, and lose them trying to master the later levels.

The game is incredibly simple, yet there is a subtle voice that continues to call, ''Come back! Play me again!'' There are 29 levels in total to master, and mastering them could conceivably take months. (That's how long it took me, at any rate.)

Mastery of Snakebyte requires more than fast reflexes. You have to be able to look at the map and make a split second decision as to how you will collect the next apple. A wrong turn could get you fatally trapped in a box, or it might make it impossible to reach the next apple without running out of time. With split second timings and difficult mazes, Snakebyte is guaranteed to get adrenaline flowing.

Although the Apple II isn't really the cutting edge these days, Snakebyte still manages to look nice. The developers went out of their way to give each level a different color scheme, and some of them form pretty patterns. Between levels or lives you will be flashed the title screen. It is designed fairly well, but you don't really get enough time to look at it.

Even though Snakebyte has no music, the sound effects (which consist of moving, eating apples, and dying) help build the tension. The steady beat of travel is reminiscent of a racing heart, which you are sure to experience while playing.

Snakebyte may be a very small and simple game, but it what it intends to do--create a fast and tense game--it does flawlessly. Snakebyte is a worthy challenge for anyone who desires hours of cheap, mindless entertainment.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/12/01, Updated 04/12/01