Time to Beat: 1h 41m
Beaten?: 100% Completed

Not to be dramatic, but this is one of those games that honestly reminds me why I even play games. Creative, short, fun, pretty, and very hard to put down.

Basically, you play as a rabbit hitting a giant ball in the air with a baseball bat, stick, hammer, etc. It's a bit of an incremental game, where the more times you bounce the ball, and the higher, the more coins you earn for buying upgrades. It has that 2008 Newgrounds addictive flash game vibe for sure.

Pretty much everything that is done here is done very well; I love the immediate pause whenever you hit the ball so that you can visually appreciate where you've hit the ball and the trajectory is then predictable ("I hit it a little short by accident so it will fly up and towards me") as well providing a ton of drama for when the ball is coming down very fast and you're unsure whether you'll hit it or not. These dramatic hits provide more and more excitement as one game of keep-up goes on longer.

The only criticism I really have of the game is that there isn't much content and the spacing of it is too wide, but I also sort of appreciated it. It takes a long time to earn the later upgrades and by the time you do, you're almost certainly going to be quite tired of playing, and yet, if they had come sooner I think I would have quit just because the game was over, and not because I had spent the amount of time necessary to feel that I was getting really skilled at what the game was actually asking me to do.

I still don't feel that skilled at it -- getting perfect hits seems to have a touch of randomness to it, or is just extremely precise -- but I do feel I got everything out of the game I could ask for and I really enjoyed it.

Compared to all the garbage that comes out on Steam for a dollar or two these days, this game feels worth $10 despite having about two hours of content. It's Just Fun, in a way that a lot of games seem to struggle to understand how to be. Loved it.

I've thought about making some games like this myself in the past but never followed up. It's sort of a game where you spend twenty minutes walking around someone's thoughts about a phase in their life, discussing their memories, emotions, lessons learned, etc. I expected something less honest and interesting based on the title, but it was both honest and pretty interesting.

I really appreciate the idea of being able to make games as a way of sharing our feelings and stories, and tools like Bitsy make that more possible. This is a good one.

And, incidentally, I'm glad to hear the author was in a better place when they made it than they were in the time they're talking about.

Since there isn't any reviews, here's a quick one:

This is probably one of the first arcade games that's still pretty fun today for a solo player. Drive a cowboy back and forth with a spinner knob and shoot a coin in the air.

Partially what makes it hold up compared to its almost-50-year-old contemporaries is that there is a little more of the complication of the issue at hand which is what we're used to as players now. Not only do you have to shoot the coin but multiple areas are there to bounce the coin off for various point values, encouraging a sort of risk-reward gameplay. Shooting the coin at different edges will propel it in different directions, creating a situation where it's quickly discovered that bouncing it off the walls will lead to the highest score, but also make it harder to hit the coin as it reverses direction quickly and speeds up. Simultaneously, bats appear and vultures fly across the screen which can be shot for points. Also, if the coin hits one of the bumpers at the bottom corners of the screen, it bounces back up for a free round!

There's quite a bit going on here compared to other arcade games of 1978 and before, even though games were just getting ready to take off. After all, Asteroids and Galaxian came out the year after this. It wouldn't take long after that for video games to enter into a period of rapid complication.

At any rate, Dead Eye is a fun little game that I could certainly see giving a whirl now and again to try for a new high-score, or competing with your friends on a cabinet at a party. It still holds that appeal in a way that many of its contemporaries struggle to.