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Bumbler Bee-Luxe
Created by: James Hague
Platform: Power Macintosh
So the twin stick shooter, pioneered by Robotron, which frees movement direction from shooting direction, was a massive evolutionary leap over the vintage Berzerk style, which forced you to always be facing what you wanted to shoot. For a top down game, it’s basically the perfect control method. But it’s not the only alternative to Berzerk controls. There’s kind of a cool little evolutionary dead-end to be explored by the true anti-Berkzerk: a game where you always shoot away from where you’re facing.
Enter Bumbler Bee-Luxe! Created by legendary coder James Hague for the Power Mac (and only the Power Mac). You play a bee defending the hive against waves of invading insects, and yes, you shoot stingers with your ass! This impossibly cute top-down gem burst on the scene in the late ‘90s at the height of the dingy, dark FPS era, and it’s pretty much the anti-Quake: It’s 2D, brightly colored, non-scrolling, top down, and impossibly cute.
The butt-shooting mechanic actually works better than you may think, especially given the tight confines of the screen (think lots of circling), and the game is almost criminally addictive. Playing the game sends you into pure shooter Zen faster than almost anything else I know. The only reason PopCap or someone else hasn’t ripped it off is probably because they can’t play it. It doesn’t run on modern hardware, and even tracking down a build is almost impossible at this point.
The fun factor is no surprise given the game comes from James Hague. Now a senior direct at Volition, he’s been coding since the Atari 800 era, and is one of the unsung heroes of the retro revival in games. His 1997 book Halcyon Days (available for free these days at www.dadgum.com) was one of the first works to celebrate the classic designers, and the interviews (with everyone from Dani Bunton to Ed Rotberg) remain great reading. Hague also maintains a pretty great coding blog at http://prog21.dadgum.com/.
Making a game fun using standard controls and metrics is hard enough. Making a fun game using a totally illogical and non-standard control scheme is wicked impressive. Add in some super cute programmer art insects and you’re pretty much there!
