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Beam 'Em Up
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About the game
Beam 'Em Up is a small arcade game about a flying saucer with a taste for cattle. The field below stretches across four screens, the cows wander about and moo, and your job is to get every one of them into the tractor beam at the same time.
That last part is the trick. The counter at the top shows how many cows are in the beam right now, not how many you have caught, so you have to nudge the herd together, lift them and keep them all floating while you drift over to the stragglers. Let go of the button and the cows drop back to the grass with a bounce.
Meteors cross the sky from time to time. A hit shoves the saucer sideways and shuts the beam off for a moment, which usually means the whole herd falls. Gather everyone and the round ends; the next one adds another cow, up to fifteen.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It was made in 2020 for one of the game jams of the Arduboy community. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play now, press Z on the title screen and wait for the short explanation to pass.
F2 saves the full state of the emulator and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too. The game has almost no text.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / Right | D-pad | push the saucer sideways (it keeps drifting) |
| Up / Down | D-pad | raise / lower the saucer |
| Hold Z | A | tractor beam; start the game |
| Z + X | A + B | back to the title |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Fly low. The beam only reaches a short way below the saucer, so lower it close to the ground before you switch the beam on.
Herd first, lift later. Cows touching the beam are pulled towards its centre and follow the saucer, so sweep slowly along the field to bunch them up before you go after the last one.
Mind the drift. Left and right build up speed that fades slowly; tap the opposite arrow early to stop over a cow.
Watch the sides. Meteors come in from the end of the field opposite the saucer, so a quick move up or down is usually enough to let them pass.
Credits and licence
Beam 'Em Up was made by Ben Combee and released under the Apache License 2.0. Its physics code was adapted from Pharap's PhysixArduboy (Apache 2.0), and it uses Pharap's FixedPoints library (Apache 2.0), a reduced version of the Font4x6 font by Press Play On Tape (BSD) and the Arduboy2 (BSD) and ArduboyTones (MIT) libraries by Scott Allen. The licence texts are linked from this page.