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Vaadivasal
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About the game
Vaadivasal is an arcade game built around Jallikattu, the bull-taming sport of Tamil Nadu, and the name is the arena gate the bulls run out of. You play a young tamer alone on the sand of an arena. A bull comes out of the gate at full energy and charges at you, and a bull that reaches you costs you one of your three hearts. Dodging is only half of it. After a while the bull runs out of steam, stops and starts to blink. That is your moment: run up to it, grab it, and a row of five button icons appears. Press them in order, quickly, and the bull is tamed. Then the next one comes out, and the difficulty climbs from slow bulls to fierce ones. There are twenty-five bulls in all.
The game is a single-screen action game with three small ideas that fit together well: read the charge and keep out of the way, spot the blink, and then keep your nerve for the button sequence.
The interface is in Tamil
The author made the game in Tamil, and every label on screen is in Tamil: the title, the word for lives at the lower left and the counter of tamed bulls at the lower right. The game does not use much text, and what matters is easy to follow without reading it. On the title screen press Enter, and the arena shows up right away. Hearts at the bottom left are your lives; the number at the bottom right counts the bulls you have caught.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the NES: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in jsnes, an NES emulator written in JavaScript. Click Play now and press Enter on the title screen. F2 saves the current state of the game in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad also works.
Controls
| Key | NES button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | Control Pad | move the tamer; also part of the catch sequence |
| X | A | catch sequence |
| Z | B | catch sequence |
| Enter | Start | start the game, pause and resume |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
How to win a round
- Dodge and wait. The bull enters at full energy. Stay out of its path until it stops and blinks.
- Grab it. Run to the bull while it blinks.
- Press the sequence. Five buttons flash on the screen. Press exactly those buttons, in that order, and quickly.
A few things worth knowing
Keep moving sideways. The bull charges in straight lines, so a step to the side at the right moment is worth more than running away from it.
Wait for the blink. A bull that has not started blinking is still full of energy. Go for the grab only once it has stopped.
The sequence uses the Control Pad too. The five icons are a mix of A, B and directions, so keep your fingers on the arrow keys as well as on X and Z.
Credits and licence
Vaadivasal is by Dinesh Richard, who made the code, the pixel art, the music and the sound effects, and released the whole repository under the MIT licence. The music engine is the FamiStudio sound driver by Mathieu Gauthier, which is free to copy and distribute as long as its notice is kept; the notice is preserved in the project and in the licence file linked from this page. The author does not publish a ready-made ROM, so the one served here was compiled, unchanged, from the project's source code. The full licence text is linked from this page.