Shopping Mall Bowling: people instead of bowling pins… but hey! They’re moving!

GAME CONTROLS

Use mouse to move left and right, left mouse click to throw the bowling ball.
You can apply a spin effect, so that ball will follow a curved trajectory: right after you’ve clicked to throw ball you can move mouse left/right to apply the spin. Just practice a bit, it’s easy and definitely useful.

Pause game: “P” or “Pause” key. This will pause and show the Options menu.
Options: you can turn off special graphical effects (such as motion blur, shading and color effects) if you see the game is not running smoothly on your PC or, in case, even lower render quality.

HOW TO PLAY

Basically you should throw your ball and hit people walking around, but not at random, you should follow a certain strategy to get good scores (explained further).

The first Level (At the Shopping Mall) is the crucial phase of the game, especially to determine the total score, while level 2 and 3, with less people walking around, are more to try to get a few more score with Spares or Strikes, plus each single person’s score is higher in 2 and 3 levels and no real crowd like in first level. By the way, scoring a Strike on level 1, however quite rare, is not impossible at all and in case next two scores include a high Combo you’ll get a pretty score.

Level 1 (At the Shopping Mall)
30 balls available
A lot of people (max 30 at the same time on screen)

Level 2 (Sidney - Opera House)
15 balls
A few people (max 15)

Level 3 (Rome - Circo Massimo)
10 balls
A very few people (max 7)

You can check the Achievements panel to figure out what the challenges are, in three difficulty levels Easy, Medium and Hard: it’s about reaching good scores, hitting a certain amount of total people, then score “combos and sequences”.

SCORES

Hitting a certain amount of people with a single throw is a Combo. Once you score a Combo, for instance, 7 people down, you will score 7000 (+ a few hit points), then you should score a higher combo to get more interesting scores.

For a good final score, it is essential to score Combos “progressively”: starting from lower to higher ones (hopefully following the Combo Sequences 1,2,3, etc..) since starting the game with a very high combo, let’s say 10, it’s an awful move since all lower combo points (1000, 2000, 3000 etc.) are gone.

Notice after Combo 10 (10000 pts worth) the next combos scores have a definitely lower value, this way:
1 = 1000,
2 = 2000,
…
9 = 9000,
10 = 10000,
11 = 1000,  <—
12 = 2000,
13 = 3000 etc..
Starting the game with a 11 combo is the worst opening ever

Spare and Strike:
You’ll notice a red triangle area fading out at the very start of the game; well that’s the spare/strike area:
if you hit 3 people or more and that area is clear (no people walking in) you’ll get a “Strike” otherwise (1 or 2 people) is a “Spare”.
Strike: next 2 throws score is doubled;
Spare: next throw score is doubled.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 1:11 am and is filed under category Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site or blog.