DropperP v1.3 - 5/10

As the description says, it is a simple game. Is it fair to expect more? I'm not sure. What I will say, though, is that the game starts to become impossible to beat after around round 30 or so. This may be human error on my part, though. For the purposes of this review, I'll be talking about the 83+/84+ version (DROPPERP.8xp), since that's the calculator I own.

Dropper is a simple game where you must collect stars using your dash bucket as they fall. The stars fall faster as your score climbs, an aspect I find quite impressive. However, at least with my experience -- this may be better on an 84+ -- the star starts off falling incredibly slowly, to the point where the beginning of the game feels almost deceptive in its inaction. As mentioned before, the game becomes (in my experience) nearly impossible to progress past 30 points, which happens because the stars start to fall too fast to catch in time.

I'm quite impressed with some of the details put into this small package of 364 bytes. As mentioned before, the stars fall faster as you catch them, but your high score is also monitored, and the game even has a quit attribution message. Of course, much of this is helped by the fact that this is a home-screen game, something I honestly wish more BASIC and even z80 Assembly titles experimented more with. Is that enough to change my opinion on the game much? I'd say no, but it's still plenty of fertile ground -- assuming this package is still being updated, of course.

In regards to suggestions, I'd say that the high score feature could be used to determine the speed of falling, as opposed to the current score, and that the change in speed could be revised and capped so as to make the game feel more dynamic and fair. In its current state, though, I still feel that Dropper accomplishes what it set out to do, and that's to be a simple BASIC game -- no more, no less. I'd say 5/10 for this game, a soft recommendation to anyone interested. It can fill a slow afternoon, but not much more than that.