"I'm telling you, dude!"

Every once in a while, a game is released that makes me glad I'm a Mac Owner.

Some years ago, perhaps around 2000/1, a disk was released with the current issue of MacUser with some shareware games on it. Thus, the UK was introduced to a seemingly irrelevant title named Airburst. It was such a simple game - you were sitting on a helium balloon, trying desperately to divert a razor sharp burster ball so it doesn't pop your balloon and send you 30000 feet down. With this concept, some 15 different games were created, ranging from deathmatches to football.

The game's developer, Strange Flavour, then a spare-time venture run by two brothers, Adam and Aaron Fothergill, both game programmers in their full time jobs, has done a lot since then. They released an internet playable version of Airburst first. This was followed with the release of ToySight, a collection of camera controlled games not too different from the PS2's EyeToy Play. They partnered with the US based publisher Freeverse Software to reach a bigger market than simple shareware. The brothers quit their dayjobs and booted Strange Flavour into a full time Mac-development job. And finally, inevitably, a sequel to Airburst was produced. This was Airburst Extreme. This was to be a game to make Mac owners proud. If, by some miracle, Steve Ballmer (C.E.O. of Microsoft) is reading, listen up: We don't need "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers". Just one of our developers can kick your asses AND your freedom. Airburst Extreme is that good.

The things that made Airburst good are the very same things that make Airburst Extreme better. You're still riding that helium balloon and still being plagued by those razor balls, but now everything is so much more beautiful and shows more effort. The graphics in Airburst Extreme are spectacular. Whereas before, you would be shown above a static background, now the backgrounds are animated and move around under you to give that feel of movement in the air. The original Airburst was played over Earth and had only three backgrounds, while Extreme is played over every planet from Mercury to Sedna. The balloons are ever so slightly transparent now. The menu screen has been completely rehauled, showing a fancily rendered beach backdrop with full CGI characters walking around in the background. But the biggest update graphically is the addition of CG scenes in which the characters interact in "Story Mode" before each level. I have no gripe with the graphics themselves save the way they are coded into the game. Each character has a movie file for "walk", "stand" and "talk", etc, and these are located in a folder next to the application. This leaves them totally open to hacking. Which is good when you think about it, because it lets you... customize... the characters a little.

The music has been changed too, although not everyone agrees it's for the better. Previously, the soundtrack was composed of short, 4 second MP3s that played continuously in a random order. It made the soundtrack unpredictable, like the game. Now, however, the game features a full blown OST with work by Freekstar, Abdoujaparov, and Jaffa Mountain (which is led by none other than Adam Fothergill). Just add the Deadbeat Radicals "Little Yellow Mini" and we have a masterpiece of an OST. Somewhat less pleasingly, some of the humourous voice-bytes from the characters when they pick up powerups have been dropped and replaced with more poweruppy sounds. I really miss the old "Noooo!" one when someone picks up a No Bat. Bring it back. Please.

The gameplay, of course, the most important part. This has been updated a LOT. First off, in the original Airburst, there was a game and no more. In Airburst Extreme, we finally have a story to motivate us to play endless games. It begins as stars BCM and Maya meet up for a League game on Mars, and Maya mentions she has lost contact with her family on Pluto. While BCM contacts his friend Flux who promptly leaves to investigate, we encounter Moon, seemingly stuck in an endless cycle of time-space warps. The enemy in the story is the monopolistic Mars Media Mega Corporation, who broadcast deep space adverts for their pay-per-view-per-second channels that are so bad that the next solar system decide to invade. For such a simple story, it is remarkable well put together and features some most humourous cutscenes. But this is only the beginning. There are now 32, count 'em, 32 different game types to play. There's the story, the old Levels game, and a Tutorial. There's the deathmatch mode, in which eight players face off at once. There's football. There's Catch the Frog. There's Grenade Roulette. There's Racing. There's Asteroids. There's even a little Space Invaders minigame. It goes on forever. Players of the original Airburst can unlock Mini Mode, which makes everything really small for some reason.

Each of the games involves the same idea - you sit on your floater bubble and your shield bubbles, and must keep yourself from getting popped. Most of the time, you are being plagued by burster balls, however variants include asteroids and footballs that act as bursters. Each time you deflect the ball, your character is knocked back slightly and gains some Power. Eventually, you will end up with all the players zooming around the screen at insane speed with god-knows-how-many bursters that swerve in the air, bounce in random directions, do double damage, wrap around the edge of the screen, and carry a Tag (which summons an infuriating canary/woodpecker hybrid that pecks away at your shield balloons). Then, out of nowhere, Maya scrambles everyone's controls, BCM starts sending balls that can bypass bats, Jera spawns a fatassed laser that destroys bubbles and Inku disappears completely. Games get from strategic to chaotic very quickly and will test your reflexes to the extreme. Sure, you can keep your eye on the ball, but which damn ball do you keep your eye on?

Besides the original Airburst cast of four (BCM, Flux, Maya and Moon), several new characters have been added, including Veng from the planet Sedna, Inku the football mad interplanetary shuttle pilot, Jera the Mars Media's sponsored entrant into the Airburst Federation, Pook the "ordinary cute genius hillbilly girl", Mars Media Mega Corporation robots, and Mars Media Mega Corporation Executives. Each character now has a unique "Extreme" power that is used by the tried and tested method of building up energy in a meter. And of course, there are powerups to mix things up a bit. We have bat power ups, such as Big Bat, Double Bat, Sticky Bat, Ickle Bat, Freeze Bat and the unforgiving No Bat. There's balloon power ups, such as Regenerate, Armour, Explosive Balloons, and Instant Deathmatch. The list goes on. There are several new powerups, examples being Double Bat, Explosive Balloons and Gravity. Too many of these can make the game seriously chaotic and an absolute ball to play.

One feature that is very nice indeed is network play via GameSmith. If you have a (free) account, you can play any of the various multiplayer game types over the internet (or over a LAN). If you don't want to create an account, you can play over LAN any time, or you can opt for a round of AirMail - a play-by-mail game type in which you race your opponent through a maze.

To make things prettier, you can customise the designs of each player's floater balloon and the surrounding shield balloons. You can choose between applying designs to the balloons themselves or using a skin that covers the entire floater apparatus. You can create your own skins using image-editing applications using the template provided. This adds a nice personalization touch to the gameplay.

One thing that made Airburst the Original great was the fact that each player only had three controls - rotate CW/CCW and fire. This meant not only that a three year old could grasp the game, but that you could easily fit four people around a keyboard if you had to. In Extreme, the trend continues, albeit with an extra button added for the Extreme Powers and the new Thrust feature.

The game has pleasantly surprising system requirements. Most people shouldn't have any problem at all meeting these requirements, as more or less every Mac from the first "white" iBook up is capable of playing this game. The exact requirements are a 400MHz G3 processor and a semi-decent graphics card. It does, however, require Mac OS X 10.1.5 or above - yet another company cuts off support for the aged OS 9. If you're really desperate, you can downgrade from millions to thousands of colours, or from a 1080 x 768 resolution to 800 x 600 if you find yourself unable to meet these requirements.

And when you get down to playing the game, the four player ease factor, the beautiful graphics and smooth animations, the excellent musical score and the general hilarity of the characters come together to create a truly magnificent spectacle of a game. If you don't like the music, change it - the music files are easy to modify. Whichever way you look at it, the Strange Flavour brothers have taken a very good game and made it extremely good indeed.

Airburst Extreme is available from any retailer who has a sense of taste, and also from websites such as Amazon, from the Apple Store, from Freeverse's Store, and numerous other web stores for the bargain price of $29.99. Go forth and buy. See you in the sky...

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 09/10/04