Snakes Subsonic
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| Snakes Subsonic

Anybody who's ever spent time with a snake will know they don't deserve the reputation they have for cunning. This idea probably comes from the bible, in which it was a serpent that persuaded Eve to quench her deplorable thirst for education by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Snakes aren't really like that (although women are known to enjoy both learning and fruit, and it turns out both are perfectly good for you.)

In truth, a 'snake in the grass' is little more than a twitching tube of bone and meat, about as cunning as the rudimentary thermostat that switches your kettle off when the water boils. All it can do is bite things and mate. For this reason, it's appropriate that Nokia has eschewed the obvious course of imbuing its iconic reptile with bubbly character as the technology has improved.

Snakes Subsonic takes place in just the same kind of sharp-edged electronic vacuum that the first game took place in. The graphics may have come a long way, the sound may be light years ahead, and there may be one or two more things to do than there used to be, but it's still basically simple.

You play as a snake, slithering like a pencil over a grid of squares. Naturally, you're confined to the grid's two axes, although the grid itself extends to three. That is, you can climb walls and slink onto the underside of platforms, but you're always pinned to the bottom of the screen.

The aim of each level is to empty your 'evolver bar' by collecting strings of blue power-ups. As you chomp along one of these strings, the power-ups disappear in steadily rising musical tones, like a finger running up the keys on a piano. Miss one (generally by not taking a corner at the right time) and you have to start again. You need to get them all at once, or not at all.

These lines of blue power-ups aren't always available. To make them appear, you have to collect green power-ups, and so the procedure for each level basically entails hoovering up a line, looking for the next green object, hoovering up the next line, looking for the next green object, and so on till your evolver bar depletes and you advance to the next level.

There's more to the game than that, of course. Like a million arcade classics, there are letters dotted around the levels that make up the word SNAKES. Collect all of these and you open up bonus levels.

It's not as easy as simply looking for them, however. Items come and go according to some bizarre law of quantum displacement. Often, a letter will be available right up until you finish off a particular line of blues, whereupon it'll disappear for no obvious reason. There's an arcane order to it all.

And arcane is the word. For all that Snakes Subsonic has its roots in a game that epitomises The Establishment, it's weird; not least because it all takes place in a completely inscrutable world.

Objects like rockets (which you fire with '5') are clearly discernable, as are the enemy snakes that occasionally appear, and shields, but by and large it's difficult to tell exactly what the jagged little heaps of polygons you encounter are supposed to be.

Some of them clamp onto your head and drain your health, shrinking you by one segment at a time. Others bounce around and knock units of health off you when you crash into them.

There are things that look like skulls, and things that look like great spindly insects. They want to hurt you. That's all you know. Sometimes you have to hurt them, with a bridge only appearing or a wall only disappearing when you've killed a particular gatekeeper with a rocket.

The landscape over which you slither is made up of several textures. Red squares slow you down, while green ones speed you up. There are also objects littered about, some of which you can smash through at the cost of one health point, and some of which you just bang into.

The problem is, whereas the levels in the original N-Gage Snakes were designed to be difficult in themselves to negotiate, requiring skill, cat-like reactions and plenty of patience, the levels in Subsonic are sprawling and irrelevant to the gameplay. Unfortunately, nothing fills the hole created by this absence of level-design.

In most respects, though, Subsonic is similar to its predecessor. It's slightly bizarre, and relies too heavily on you remembering where to go from previous failed attempts. It's a fairly unique game, and with good reason: it's not quite a good enough idea to rip off.

It looks fine, with flowing, slickly minimal 3D graphics. There's pop-up, which is surprising given the relatively simplicity of what's happening on the screen, but this glitch never really spoils the gameplay, because there's not enough of the gameplay to be spoiled.

The sound is fine, but not quite what you might expect given that the word 'sonic' appears in the title. It's a retro arcade soundtrack, but nothing more than that. Nothing, certainly, to merit the top billing it gets.

The four sectors – Earth, Fire, Water, and Air – are made up of distinct palettes. Each comprises ten levels, adding up to forty, plus the bonus levels you unlock by getting all six of the hidden letters. It took me about, oh, two hours to get through these. It wasn't the best two hours of my life, and it wasn't the worst. The first level is pretty much like the last, which is neither a good thing nor a bad.

There's a multiplayer mode, but it's not what you might be hoping for. Snake's first influence is the bike section of Tron, where the object is to make you opponent crash into the trail you leave behind. That's what you had to do in the old versions of Snake, and it was great.

In Subsonic, on the other hand, you just have to beat up to three opponents to a set score. The mathematicians amongst you will have already worked out that this is a roughly 300 per cent less exciting kind of multiplayer.

Ultimately, though, Snakes Subsonic is fine. It's fine. But it's not as good as Snakes, or arguably even Snake. It's got the graphics, the sound, the power-ups, the baddies, the rotating world. It just doesn't know what to do with them. It's a chopping board full of good ingredients, but not a meal, and certainly not fit to appear on the N-Gage's fancy new menu.

Snakes Subsonic

While it looks and plays fine, Snakes Subsonic falls short of its predecessors by not knowing which of them to emulate, nor how to innovate on its own terms. A wasted opportunity
Score
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.