The Slacker's Guide - Bullet Candy: Back to Basics

by Chris Barylick
May 30th, 2006

Sometimes the best games come down to simplicity. While a game may include a terrific story, amazing graphics and a skill tree that can be slowly built and customized to control every aspect of a playable character, there are times where this is the last thing the player wants to double click on their Mac.

The best equivalent might be a choice of beverage. If you want an icy cold root beer from the fridge, odds are you aren't going to drive to the supermarket to pick up the ingredients for the perfect mimosa.

Bullet Candy by Charlie's Games is perhaps the best possible example of this idea in a game. A pure top-down space shooter that behaves like an arcade classic on steroids, the game takes the space/survival shooter precedent established by classics like Asteroids, Robotron, Tempest 2000 and mega-shooter Mutant Storm, and builds on the genre.

Taking down the alien hordes in Bullet Candy.

Dodge, shoot, move, grab the power-ups and try to survive. It's an old formula, but it still holds true and provides for an amazing amount of fun. Now, factor in amazing graphics, an energized rock track, retro sound effects, almost nonstop particle explosions and everything else that makes the genre work. Bullet Candy is a survival title in its purest form with the player being challenged to survive wave after wave of enemies, each level starting anew with whatever power-ups they might have earned (that may have completely saved them in the previous level) being stripped away.

True, this may not be the deepest title in the world, but Charlie's Games has put forth a fine addition to a fun genre. Add in power-ups such as lasers and three way shots as well as 50 levels, multiple game modes, unlockable levels and the title becomes worth its $19.95 registration fee. For a quick 15 to 20 minutes of gameplay, Bullet Candy becomes a welcome addition to the Dock.

Bullet Candy is currently available as a Mac and Windows title and stands as an 8.4 megabyte download that expands to occupy 10.7 megabytes of the hard drive. The game is currently being sold through MacGameStore.com and requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later, a 1 gigahertz G4 processor or higher, 256 megabytes of RAM, and a graphics card with 32 megabytes of VRAM or better to run.

That wraps it up for this week. As always, if you see anything new, cool or useful in the Mac universe,

Chris Barylick covers games for The Mac Observer, and has written for Inside Mac Games, MacGamer, UPI, the Washington Post, and other publications.

Send polite comments to , or post your comments below.

Most Recent Columns From The Slacker's Guide

• Tetris Brought Up to Speed: Quinn - September 15th
• Something Cool For the Nerds: GLTron - September 11th
• Open Source Meets Soul Train: StepMania - September 1st

The Slacker's Guide Archives