Escape Obliterizer Deluxe

About the game

Escape Obliterizer Deluxe is a survival game played on a single screen. Del, a small green square, sits in the middle of a cross of five spots: the centre and four diamond-shaped bases above, below, to the left and to the right. Holding a direction moves him onto that base, and letting go brings him back to the centre. That is the whole movement, and it has to be enough.

Hazards fire at those five spots. First come vertical lasers that cut down one column, then horizontal lasers along a row, and later bombs that burst on one side of the board. Each one is set up a moment before it goes off, so the game is about reading where the next blast will land and being somewhere else when it fires. The score climbs every moment you stay alive, and the longer the run, the more often the hazards come, until they arrive faster than anyone can dodge.

There is a catch to hiding on a base. Standing on one earns extra points, but a small meter beside Del fills while you hold the direction. Stay too long and he gets stunned, stuck in the centre for a moment while the lasers keep coming.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Color: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It needs the colour console, and it runs here in binjgb, a Game Boy emulator compiled to WebAssembly, in its Game Boy Color version. Click Play, then press X on PLAY.

Your high score is kept in the cartridge's battery memory, which is stored in this browser. F2 also saves the full state of the emulator and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too. The game is in English, with very little text.

Controls

Key	Game Boy button	Action
Arrow keys (hold)	Control Pad	stand on the base in that direction; let go to return to the centre
Enter	Start	pause and resume
↑ / ↓	Control Pad	choose PLAY or CREDITS on the menu
← / →	Control Pad	choose YES or NO after a game over
X	A	confirm
F2 / F4	—	save / load the emulator state

A few things worth knowing

The centre is not safe either. Lasers cut through the middle column and the middle row as often as through the sides, so waiting there is no plan. Watch where the next blast is lined up and step away from it, then come back.

Let go before the meter fills. Short hops onto the bases score well; long stays end in a stun. Releasing the key resets the meter, so tap your way around instead of holding.

The opening is practice. At first only vertical lasers fire. Horizontal lasers join at 500 points and bombs at 1,000, and from there the gaps between blasts keep shrinking, so use the first seconds of every run to find a rhythm.

Read the credits. The credits screen ends with a reward for the curious: a button sequence to enter on the menu that unlocks a choice of skins for Del.

Credits and licence

Escape Obliterizer Deluxe is João Godinho's Game Boy Color remake of Escape Obliterizer, a web game he made with Marco Santos and Eduardo Rodrigues during a hackathon in 2016, as the game's credits screen says. João wrote the new version in C with the original Game Boy Development Kit and redrew all of its graphics and sounds for the Game Boy. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3, and the author's repository at the version served here is hosted alongside the game as its source code. The licence text and the source code are linked from this page.