Game Reviews

Antithesis

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Antithesis
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For all of Antithesis's stark menus and art-game leanings, it's fundamentally Pong - albeit yanked into the modern age of endless challenge, touchscreen controls, and Game Center compatibility.

Of course, straight Pong wouldn't be particularly appealing in this world of Angry Birds and Jetpack Joyride, so Antithesis offers a considerably larger challenge.

You play as the black paddle, competing against the mysterious and unrelenting force of the white paddle. Things start off slowly, with one ball bouncing across the screen.

Every time you deflect a ball back to your opponent, another one spawns, and every time you miss a ball the white paddle's surrounding darkness creeps into your playing space, eventually obscuring you completely and killing you in the process. It's like an indie gaming take on Alan Wake.

TV Tennis

Antithesis is an extremely simple game, but a curiously addictive one. A typical session won't last more than a few minutes, but it's an acute exercise in stress-management and concentration.

You quickly learn to track the trajectories of incoming balls well before they get to you, and often before they even hit your enemy's paddle.

And after a minute or so things get even more hectic as projectile power-ups come into play, meaning not only that you've got to manage this deluge of balls and your impending obsolescence, but that you've got to dodge a fiery red missile too. Fortunately you can fire one back to help stem the flow.

Donkey Pong

Antithesis isn't perfect. It feels very much like a game made by one person (which it is), and the lack of instructions is a pain. It also desperately needs some sort of multiplayer mode in an update - an iPad version would be ideal for this.

Still, as a first effort it's a surprisingly effective take on the endless genre, and a clever twist on a very familiar theme.

Antithesis

While it's not entirely original or polished, Antithesis is a clever take on Pong that would benefit from a multiplayer update
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