Crystal Quest Classic

The only traumatic experience from my childhood for which I am nostalgic. I played this on my old Mac LCIII when I was a kid, and loved it. Those old mouses were garbage so it was a pain in the neck to control the ship, and the difficulty level was extremely punishing, but it was beautiful, funny, and fun, so I stuck with it. All these years later, this super-polished port runs like a dream and I find that, wow, it's still beautiful, still funny, still fun, and still ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ impossible. It just takes me longer to hit the wall, now. The graphics are brilliant, sparkly and neon-drenched. The sound effects are hilarious and memorable (I've been muttering "Mledn" to myself apropos of nothing for decades now) except for a few which are intolerable - especially in bulk. The Menace makes a laser beam sound specifically designed to make you hate the concept of lasers and, eventually, the concept of sound. But that level-ending notification noise is easily the finest hour of audio design in video gaming history, so all is forgiven. The controls are simple, and early on they work great; later on the game uses them to punish you, as in the case of the Parasites which make a beeline for you - you can only shoot forwards, so you have to run away then swing back and hope they aren't already too close, and also hope that your incredibly specific firing stream actually hits them before they hit you. The Dumples take a billion shots to kill, and you can't spare the time when there's a screenfull of nasties in the way, the Banes send countless indestructible bouncing balls across the screen, the Shrapwardens explode and probably kill you when they're hit and the Trimpets rocket along linear paths; all of this combines to make the play area essentially uninhabitable after a certain point. Yeah, the difficulty... spikes. The first few levels are fun, and people born without mutated brains can figure them out. By about the dozenth level the game starts getting nasty, and by about Wave 30 the game locks out ninety-nine percent of humanity from further progress... and that's the halfway point. Luckily, by the time the game becomes impossible it also becomes no fun. It puts crystals next to the spawn points, and enemies blast out of them at such a rate of speed that it is impossible - meaning not possible - to collect them without dying. The mines littering the field become unavoidable; a favourite trick is to put one immediately beside the player's spawn point, so that the slightest twitch of the mouse kills you instantly. Even the smart bombs which clear the level get shrugged off by the game in later waves - it basically goes "Yeah whatever" and immediately fills the screen with nasties like nothing happened. The exit starts to move back and forth, the game randomly selects enemies from the entire roster with no regard for survivability, and eventually the term "bullet hell" doesn't begin to do the situation justice. By the time you hit your personal limit you won't be sorry to lose, you'll just be pissed off and ready to go do something else. I wish more games had this manual ejector seat function; if I'm on Wave 30 and I only have a few lives left I just plow myself into the mines, enter my high score and quit. All that and it's still adorable, entertaining, and fun. Just don't have any illusions about its intentions towards you - even with your fancy new two-button mouse and adult reaction times, you're still in for a world of hurt. If you like a quick, flashy challenge and you know when you're beat, buy Crystal Quest. If you think most games are too easy and you're mad about it, wow, buy Crystal Quest right this instant... and try not to type the words "too easy" in your review, because it's not nice to lie, and you will be lying.

This is a faithful recreation of a classic. It is one of the first few video games I ever played on the family Mac. The sound effects are amazing (almost all vocal noises done by the creator). Simple but challenging, the levels quickly become chaotic in a good way. If you want to go back in time to when video games were just plain fun, get this game.

Timeless, mouse-based, hand-eye coordination training game.. Old school Mac game.

Remake of the first game I ever played. Executed perfectly. Great if you wana train your mouse skills but def worth a pick up for nostalgia value.

Please update this to work on 64-bit Macs.

non stop action.