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Genre: Game - Arcade action

Developer: Dingo Games

Price: $19.95

Somewhere out there is a design document for a rather small-time, independent shareware-game-that-could. This design document could be on a bar napkin, or a Post-It note, or maybe it's just a quickie little TextEdit document that has been since consigned to the depths of an unorganized documents folder. The beginnings are humble, and legitimately so, for the design document is only one sentence—no, a sentence fragment—and that sentence reads, "Dolphins with frickin' laser beams."

That, I think, sums up Laser Dolphin quite nicely.

Laser Dolphin is a cute little shareware game that puts you in control of one Laser Dolphin, a heavily-armed Ecco who has to save the Prime Minister from his evil alien kidnappers. Apparently, this entails cruising around several different aquatic mazes laden with unfriendly mines, suicide-bomber sea turtles, air-to-ground seagull bombers, and fish with homing missiles, to name some of the less exotic enemies. (That's right; those are the less exotic ones.) Blast bad guys, avoid danger, and roam the sea in search of Golden Dolphin icons that refill your health and can potentially unlock special features—it's some comfortable Sega Genesis-era 2D action the likes of which is rarely seen these days.

At first glance, Laser Dolphin's appeal is less than readily apparent. Yeah, it's dolphins, it's lasers, it's cool for about five minutes. Like every other game I seem to have written up in the past month or so, you control the orientation of your dolphin with the mouse, fire with the mouse button, and control the direction you're swimming in with the keyboard (WASD by default). Since the direction you're facing affects the speed at which you swim, it takes a little while to master the ins and outs of strafing and swimming out of danger, but after a few levels you'll be facing off against missile-fish like a veritable Flipper. What sets Laser Dolphin apart from the pack (or herd or pod or murder or whatever it is dolphins travel in) is the unabashed joy it takes in simple movement; something, sadly, which is generally ignored by any kind of 2D game these days. It isn't the graphics or the controls or the gameplay alone which makes the game surprisingly impressive; rather, it's the interplay between the game's disparate elements that combines to make moving a silly-looking dolphin that packs heat a pleasure. The smooth, detailed animation of the protagonist, the level design that challenges you to take it as quickly as you can (complete with a record of how quickly you complete each level, should you wish to beat your personal records), and the controls that let you manipulate the movements of this marine mammal quickly and intuitively while maintaining a semblance of organic, accurate motion; it is all of this, working together, that yields a game experience that is wonderfully focused on something simple as how much fun it can be to be a dolphin. It's something that hasn't been done much since, well, the Sonic the Hedgehog days, and Dingo Games makes it work darn well underwater.

It is this unadulterated locomotive joy that makes the other two game modes in Laser Dolphin, Race and Stunt, more than just a poorly executed distraction from the action. Stunt mode provides you with several levels to test your dolphin-piloting skills for points a la Tony Hawk—various elements of your airborne stunts are rewarded with points corresponding to how difficult the stunt was. 720s, big air and slick landings are the name of the game here, and should you net a sufficient quantity of points before time runs out, you'll be rewarded with a medal. Race mode plays more like a time trial than an adversarial race; like Stunt mode, you're running up against the timer, but your goal is to complete a track by passing through every ring on the map as fast as you can. If that's still not enough to satiate your craving for dolphin, a custom level editor is available so you can design your own hard-core habitats and distribute them for the world to see. There's no question about it; Laser Dolphin is fun to move around, and the game milks that for all it's worth.

Ultimately, Laser Dolphin is a notable success not because it pushes the bounds of shareware games or 2D games or independently developed games or anything else, but because it has the guts to focus on one particularly enjoyable aspect of the game and orient everything else in the game around it. It isn't fun because the graphics are awesome or the controls are responsive or anything like that; it's just because everything involved in making Laser Dolphin go from point A to point B feels, well, like that's the point, and everything else is just window dressing.

Download the free demo.