Every Extend Extra

Written by James Dauer  on August 23, 2006

First Impressions: It's a blazing bomb bonanza!

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Tetsuya Mizuguchi knows how to craft great games. We've seen it in his past work such as the catchy rhythm shooter Space Channel 5 and in his highly acclaimed puzzle game Lumines. Now with his new team known as Q Entertainment, Mizuguchi-san is about to breathe new life into a popular freeware computer game that has been floating around on the internet for some time now.

To the untrained eye Every Extend Extra (known as E3 for short) may at first look like a techno remix of Bizarre Creation's very popular Geometry Wars, but upon closer inspection, E3 is actually quite a different beast. While in many popular shooters, the object is to kill everything on screen while avoiding your own destruction, E3 encourages players to blow up their УshipФ in order to wipe out as many enemies on screen as possible. Here's how the game works. As the screen fills with enemies, players must detonate their УshipФ causing a shockwave. This shockwave will destroy all nearby enemies while causing them to shockwave also. As the enemies are destroyed, their explosions cause other enemies to explode in a huge chain reaction. Clearly, the object of the game is to get as high a chain reaction as possible in order to boost your score.

Players are given a set number of explosions in E3, and once those run out, it's game over. This isn't the only problem, though. Players are also facing off against an ever running timer. As one could easily guess, when the timer hits 0, the game ends. The timer does get a small extension as more enemies are destroyed, but it definitely puts a greater since of urgency on the player. While playing the original Every Extend Extra for PC, I found this was the main reason I'd get a game over. Still, E3 is definitely made to be played in shorter bursts than Q's other puzzle games (Lumines and Meteos).

Of course, what good is an action intensive game like E3 without bosses? Once a certain number of enemies are destroyed a huge boss will appear on screen. These can usually only be destroyed by starting a chain reaction on weaker enemies which will then pass on to the boss. The object is to cause a chain reaction on the bosses' weak points in order to destroy them. This sort of reminds me of the boss fights from Sega's Shinobi for the PS2 where players had to string together a combo of enemies then use the finishing blow on the bosses. It definitely makes for interesting game playing.

The game varies from the original in some ways. First, players now have the ability to power up bombs by holding the square or circle button. Of course this takes time and causes the player's movements to slow. Also depending on how well the game is being played, as it progresses, the action will speed up on screen- much like Geometry Wars' performance based adjusting difficulty.

As far as presentation is concerned, the game will look and sound quite similar to Mizuguchi-san's other works. This means one can expect awesome techno music with driving rhythms to accompany some amazing ever-changing visuals as one progresses through the stages. Enemies will visually change from wire-frames to Japanese text while backgrounds will feature all sorts of brilliant colors and shapes. It gives a very hypnotic feel to the game while never becoming distracting to the player.

Every Extend Extra does have a few extra features up its sleeve. E3 will feature a port of the original E3. The game also features some 2-player multiplayer action, though it hasn't been revealed whether this will be strictly limited to ad-hoc mode, or if it will allow infrastructure mode.