Astraware have caught my eye once again. This time it is the game Dynamite which is the culprit for removing any spare time from my life.

The idea behind these games is deceptively simple, the player controls a cannon at the bottom of the screen and fires coloured bubbles at similar bubbles. When the colours match then the bubbles at the top of the screen vanish – the aim is to remove all of them. It is kind of Breakout meets Columns.

The game is, of course, not as easy as it sounds. There is a time limit, shown by the target bubble wall growing over time. Also the player can quite often block themselves in by slightly miss-aiming a shot and sticking it to the bottom of the descending wall, resulting in game over when the bubbles reach the player. Clever shots can remove bubbles above ones reliant on them to keep stuck to the top, in which case gravity takes over and you can clear a huge amount from screen in one go. In Dynamite the bubbles are replaced by eggs.

Dynamite records Combos as well as the standard scoring for clearing sections and the time this is done. Combos are where you clear sections of colour in rapid succession without any bubbles just landing. This adds to the goals in the game as you can really rack up a chain of them to boost your score.

There are two ways to play Dynamite, Stomped or Endless. Stomped gives you a specific amount of eggs to clear and a strict time limit to adhere to. This is shown by a huge dinosaur foot shrinking the playing area over time, Monty Python style. Endless is as it sounds, more and more eggs appear as you clear the levels. After choosing the game to play there are three difficulty levels to choose from, this can be of great help for people unused to this kind of game.

The controls for this game are spot on, smooth and responsive with total player choice of buttons used. Maybe an option to adjust them slightly may have been useful so that two different speeds of left and right could be implemented for increased accuracy, to be honest though I doubt that this will be an issue to most people. To help you start your game there is an aiming tool, this is a straight line showing the exact journey of the egg before you actually fire it – including ricochets off the walls. You get to use this once, then it becomes a single line just showing direction that it will travel in and finally on the next go there is no line at all.

As we have come to expect with Astroware games the graphics and sound throughout the game are of an extreme quality. The official site claims that this is a direct conversion of PopCap’s PC original. If anything I feel it is better as the smaller screen does the graphics more justice. Everything is clear and bright, the colours used are distinctive without being a pain and the sound and music take you straight back to the arcades. In addition to this there is a version for every PalmOS resolution and further options within the game to tweak it according to the capabilities of the individual device.