Baron von Puttyngton versus the M. C. Escher Maze of Cheese

By: ithamore

On: September 17th, 2006

Baron von Puttyngton versus the M. C. Escher Maze of Cheese (which won 2nd place last year at Stanford’s annual student competition for their Intro to Computer Graphics) is akin to collecting games such as PacMan and Katamari. But instead of collecting, you must roll a jiggly cubic, that is the said Baron, around to touch every yellow piece of cheese and turn them blue as quickly as possible. The longer you take the more platforms, corridors, and stairs will grow into structures similar to M. C. Escher’s “Relativity” and “House of Stairs” especially in higher levels.

The game play is simple (maybe too simple) and straight-forward, the Baron never dies, and the levels are infinite in number. It feels much like an Atari 2600 game re-envisioned for the 21st century.

Since no documentation is provided with the game, you might want to continue reading if you don’t want to hunt for the controls. Movement is made possible by the arrow keys or with W A S D, the space bar jumps, and gravity is rotated 90 degrees forward with Tab and Enter.

Other useful keys that should be mentioned are R to reset the Baron to his starting point, holding Ctrl brings up a map, holding the left or right mouse button and dragging it moves the camera, L skips the level, P pauses, the scroll wheel rotates gravity forward and backward (rapid scrolling is useful for “flying” through large mazes), the – key flattens the Baron, and the = key un-flattens him (the other keys: 1–6, H, M, `, and Esc).  Flattening the Baron and warping him around himself by jumping a few times while rolling will make him mutate and grow into a hypercube-like form that
shows the Maze who’s cancerous.

I like the idea of having extra controls to experiment with and to discover different ways to play a game. Mutating the Baron just a bit allows him to crawl madly through large mazes that would take much longer to finish a piece of cheese at a time, but it can also make him hard to control when he grows too much. What do you think of incorporating such non-traditional controls?

(Source:  Slashdot)