Seaweed Casserole

Rio, 1998. A casserole has gone bad. Not spoiled - bad. It boiled, it escaped, and now it sits out on the headland steaming quietly and sending its dinner up the beach after you: seaweed, prawns, rolling onions and a clattering brigade of saucepans.

Dick is a crab. Dick has enormous claws. Dick did not ask for this.

Five stages, each with its own big boss and its own trick. The Stockpot Brute plants itself and charges straight down your line. Senhor Prawn leaps clean over you to land behind. The Onion Baron fights from the back of the screen behind lobbed onions and a court that never stops arriving. The Pressure Pot is sealed - hit it and it just CLANGS - until the valve blows and it is wide open for ninety frames. And then, in the kitchen, the Casserole itself, which finds a fourth gear when it is nearly finished.

Clear each stretch before the beach will let you through. Remember you are on a plane, not a line: move up and down to line up with what you are hitting, or your claws swing through thin air. And those claws are for grabbing as much as hitting - seize an onion and hurl it, and it will take down whatever it lands on. That matters most in the boss fights, because every one of them keeps coughing up fresh ingredients, and every ingredient can be thrown straight back.

Beat the Casserole and the whole run starts again a lap harder, with your score intact.

HOW IT PLAYS

Seaweed Casserole is a scrolling beat-‘em-up in the style of the late-90s arcade: walk right, a crowd turns up, beat the crowd, and the screen lets you move on. The beach has depth as well as length. You walk up and down the sand as well as left and right, and your claws only connect with what’s on roughly the same line as you. The same goes for everything trying to hit you, so stepping up or down the beach is how you dodge.

Dick has a shell meter (his health) and three lives. Lose all your shell and you lose a life. Beat a boss and you get a fresh shell and an extra life, up to five.

THE CLAWS

• Claw punch (Z) is quick, and it also swats boiling gloop out of the air.
• Grab (X) seizes the nearest ingredient in front of you on your line. Press X again to throw it. A thrown ingredient flies across the beach and damages whatever it hits: other ingredients, and the bosses. If you grab at nothing you just snip the air.
• Your grip weakens while you’re holding something, and you’ll drop it after a few seconds, so don’t carry it around. Grab, turn, throw.

THE INGREDIENTS

Seaweed is slow and soaks up three hits. Prawns and onions go down in two but move faster. Saucepans hit harder and move fastest of all. Stockpots are slow, need five hits and hurt most when they reach you. Each stage brings a different mix, and later stages have more of the heavy stuff.

PICKUPS

Some waves leave something on the sand. A coconut gives you back a big chunk of shell. A maraca is worth five hundred points. A piri-piri pepper puts Dick into a rage for about eight seconds: his claws hit harder and faster, and his grip lasts twice as long.

THE FIVE STAGES

1. Copacabana Beach - the Stockpot Brute. He plants himself, shudders, then charges straight down your line. The whole fight teaches one lesson: when he shudders, step up or down the beach.
2. Lapa Promenade - Senhor Prawn, paid in garlic butter. Fast, and he leaps clean over you to land behind. Hiding in a corner stops working here.
3. The Night Market - the Onion Baron fights from the back of the screen behind lobbed onions, while his court keeps arriving. Walk out from under the arc, and clear the small fry before they box you in. His gas is a cloud, not a hit: stand in it and it keeps costing you shell.
4. The Rio Docks - the Pressure Pot is sealed. Claws and throws just CLANG off it, so hitting it is pointless. Wait for the valve. When it blows, the pot is open for under two seconds and takes triple damage. Have an ingredient in your claws and be standing on its line when it happens.
5. The Kitchen - the Seaweed Casserole itself. It stalks, spits and slams. Below a quarter of its health it finds a fourth gear: it spits five ways at once and slams half again as often.

TIPS

• Throw, don’t punch, at bosses. A thrown ingredient does more than twice the damage of a claw punch. Every boss keeps sending out ingredients to help it, and every one of them is ammunition.
• Throw into crowds. A thrown ingredient knocks over the first thing it hits, which makes a tight group much easier to deal with.
• Line up first. Most missed punches are on the wrong line, not out of range. Step up or down before you swing.
• Chain it. Kills close together build a combo multiplier, and a direct hit on a boss scores a bonus of its own.
• Lap two is real. Beat the Casserole and you start again from Copacabana with your score kept. The bosses have more health, the waves are bigger, and the ingredients are tougher than before.

BEHIND THE GAME

Seaweed Casserole looks like a Spectrum game: a 256×192 screen and the Spectrum’s fifteen colours. Underneath, it’s built like a later beat-‘em-up. Every character has a position on the beach, near or far as well as left or right. Everything is drawn back to front, so that nearer things overlap further ones. That’s the trick the whole genre runs on. The Spectrum had no brown, so Dick’s shell is red and yellow pixels in a chequerboard, the way artists of the time faked colours the machine didn’t have.

The soundtrack is funk rather than a chiptune: a slap bass, chord stabs on the upbeats, hi-hats and a kick drum, with the off-beat sixteenth notes pushed slightly late to give it swing. Like everything else, it’s synthesised as the game runs, from simple waveforms and noise.