YakYak

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The default player ship. A good, solid all round ship with well rounded attributes. A fine beginner ship to start playing with.




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16-Bit Bee. This busy little bee has fast shots out of the front and rear which aren't affected much by gravity, useful for picking off targets which may be far away past a gravity source. The side guns, when powered up, cover a nice wide arc. The shots aren't the strongest, however, and there are better ships for those who enjoy some nice curving action to push up the Boost Multiplier.




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Gilby. Always awesome, Gilby is a fine ship for more experienced players to switch to at the start of the game. Strong forward-firing guns are soon joined by slower, more curvable tail shots as the sheep are rescued. Good for all round offensive work whilst still affording rich opportunities for carving out some nice curves to give some decent Boost Multiplier right from the first level.




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The Claw. This is a ship for you artists of curving bullet streams. All bullet trajectories are strong and eminently curvable. Combines excellent destructive ability with superb Boost scoring potential. A lovely ship to have in hand while you work on unlocking some of the later ones.




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The ship whose shape will likely change. This is a good ship to use when you face tough enemies coming from predominantly one direction, since it has all its firepower gushing forwards in long looping streams. If you face a strong Sun that's taking a while to pop, a good seeing-to with this ship will see it soundly fucked.




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Libby. One of the best all-round ships in the fleet. Whereas the forward-facing guns aren't awesomely strong, they are fast and weakly affected by gravity, making them excellent for distance work. The tail shots are beautifully curvable, allowing one to sit next to a gravity source and have the rear shots orbit nicely, keeping the Boost Multiplier elevated, while you swivel the ship to douse attackers with your front shots.




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The Trekkie. This ship is one you will find useful on certain occasions when you are beset by attacks from opposite sides of the screen - extremely fast forward and aft guns allow you effectively to deal with such simultaneous attacks with relative ease. The auxiliary shots are a little limp, though, and mainly of use just being allowed to trickle into the nearest gravity source.




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The Best Ship in the Fleet. When you need some serious forward-facing sun-busting power this ship is hard to beat. Unusually for ships with strong forward facing ordnance, the shots are also satisfyingly loopable, allowing skilful players to wreak some serious destruction whilst also laying down some lovely aesthetically pleasing and point-engendering trajectories.




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The Rockbuster. Although somewhat lightweight on the shot strength, this minimal ship's shots are fast and nicely curvable. Quite good for close work around an energetically firing black hole.




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The Original. This ship is inspired by the original green Gridrunner ship from the Vic-20. It starts out a very good distance shooting ship, with a nice wide arc of shots right from the start, and then really comes into its own when a few sheep are rescued and the second centre gun comes online to deliver devastating concentrated strong fire to match the toughest Suns. Not a great ship for the dedicated curve artist, but a fine ally to have when artistry goes out the window and some serious arse-kicking power is necessary.




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Look, a sheepie! These are your fluffy friends in need of help. Rescue them to power up your ship. Consider each one to be a little fluffy smartbomb - rescuing each sheep causes it to unleash an expanding Flockwave that clears an area of screen that gets larger the more you save. Eventually simply touching a sheepie is enough to destroy everything on the screen.




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Aww, a shy sheepie! Some sheep are a little bit shy and you may well need to take a bit more care to get close to them. Shy sheep need rescuing too, though, so you should make the extra effort to grab them to safety.




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BONUS! You'll see this when you've collected every available ship and you then collect the Squaresheep Bonus upon opening the Black Hole.

Grabbed the Gilby one for gnu wallpaper.

Lexxy, a bio-engineered, city-sized, planet-destroying bioship in the shape of a giant wingless dragonfly! Reared on human organs, Lexxy was built to be the ultimate deterrent; a weapon that could instantly obliterate any planet and therefore keep the heretic worlds in line. For use by His Divine Shadow only!

Otter Spunk forever!

It looks like lightning bolts are coming out of the bollocks. LOL. Awesome.

Nooo! You have to keep the spunking cock, it's amazing!

I can see the need to change the Phallusizer, but please make it available for those who want such a thing. Graphics-replacement optional download, maybe?

Love the descriptions of the bullet streams and how they're power and gravitational susceptibility change the level's tactics. Can't wait to get my hands on them.

James

I like the idea of the different ships. The way I play games like this though, I'll probably ignore the descriptions and work out what's best for a given situation by 'feel'. I usually tend to find a favourite and stick to it with options like this, but I think with the bonuses and gravity and such, I'm likely to be compelled to try different ships to fit a given situation. Nice.

The fate of the phallus is probably obvious, but is something like the Trekkie likely to be okay to 'get by' without being noticed by suits? I imagine if this eventually comes out on the Xbox that it would need to be replaced by something a little less 'obvious'.

The way the ships work you *have* to try them all, even if you never use the ship selector in game. Basically there are a total of 14 ship types (10 to start with, 4 unlockable). To start with each time an extra life is given another ship type is given out. When you die, the ship type you died with is gone, and you use the next in line by default. When each of all available ship types is given out then you get bonuses instead of extra ships, so the maximum number of extra lives you can get in a fully unlocked game is 11 (you begin with three).

So in any game you get to use each ship type you started with or get through extra lives just once. By making you play with the different ships you'll get a feel for what each ship is like to use and so become better informed for when you do decide to use the ship selector and use them out of the default sequence.

That's an interesting spin on lives management.

I decided the first (default) ship was a bit fugly (it was the one I lashed up quickly just chucking numbers into the ship definition struct by hand to test how the ship renderer worked) so I replaced it with one based on the ship out of ST/Amiga Gridrunner.



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Pixel art is best done in a bitmap editor rather than by editing text .

That's *much* sweeter, man. Good move

Yep, that looks better than the original. Only one tiny little thing though - I wish the ships tilted slightly from left/right as they moved, but I suppose it wouldn't make much sense given that they can rotate.

It's quite funky because a couple of goes in and you'll have started to work out what ship suits you best for what occasion. You sorta end up working extra hard to -not- lose the ship that makes life easier for you, especially if it's one of the ones that help you crack open the black holes in no time. Can be a right fucking bitch on higher difficulty levels if you do, but I've not played with one where it's not "pull backable". Sweary? Yes. Devastating? Nope.

haha, yeah, I've even done the old "spin the wheel and chuck some OTHER ship away" desperation move when I know I'm going to die and I REALLY like my current ship. Risky though because some of the later unlockable ones are pretty sweet to use and if you're not careful you can chuck away something even better .

Reminds me I need to fix that silly bug in the current release where it resets to the default ship at the start of every level, it's really annoying when you're settled into an old favourite .