Crackpots

"Beethoven and Justin Timberlake, sitting in a tree..."

Hey pull your pants up! The tagline's just to get your attention. Anyway Crackpots is a game that gaming noobs will hate and say is too difficulty and boring, while cool gaming vets (such as myself) will see it for the classic masterpiece that it is. In crackpots you control a guy standing on his balcony and throwing pots at the spiders crawling up the wall towards you from their little hole down below.

Moving left and right is very fluid and smooth and all the animations and graphics are nice and very cool to see. Sounds are great as well with nothing annoying. They went for the simple designs here and most things are small and I don't think that it could have been done better. Good job in the sounds/graphics department.

Gameplay consists of moving left and right while calculating which pot the little spider will climb at from under. Of course you can wait until it actually starts climbing and then complain like a little ***** how it's too difficult to get all the spiders so it's your decision if you choose to be a clever gamer or a dumb noob.

Using your intelligence you can calculate from the spider's speed (which increases as you progress) and gravitational force when exactly to throw your pots and kill dem buggers. The different spiders also have different climbing patterns once they actually start climbing (increasing difficulty as levels move on) and knowing when it will be right under your pot will help you in getting more points in the game.

Crackpots is very enjoyable and fun, and when it becomes a little harder it only requires you to use your brain. Of course with much experience you can be a great player as well. When I was a little kid (4 or 5 years old) I used to get higher scores than my dad who is a neurosurgeon. Honest, he really was/is, which means he's clever. There's even a conference in Scotland he's going to next month, I'll tell him to buy me Guitar Hero because where I live they don't sell its controller and shipping from ebay or the official publisher's site would alone cost over 60$ (yikes!). But I like guitars and I bougth a CG-7 Classic guitar (Fender) a couple of months ago and I'm still learning (by myself) so maybe the game will toughen up my weak finger muscles.

But then again, regarding being better than my dad, I was one of those little nerdy kids who solved math problems for fun and read Shakespeare. God I wish I could still be a full fledged nerd now. I'm clever but don't like to study anything at all, which is preventing me from getting the desired GPA minimum I need in order to continue studing a Masters degree in England when I finish here :(. In fact I have a Calculus 3 test tomorrow and I don't wanna study it :(.

Anyway I think I've strayed a bit from the topic at hand, hope this review doesn't get rejected for random filler. Oops I'm doing it again. So uh, Crackpots is very fun and requires intelligence and experience to enjoy, so if you're a gaming noob who would give it a 6 out of ten if reviewed then don't bother playing it. Just know that you'll missing out on one of the best Atari 2600 games.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/18/06