Stick Avalanche 2     What? Stick Avalanche is one of the most simple yet aggravatingly addictive concepts for a game you could imagine. You are a stick. Coloured cubes are good. Triangles are bad. Everything falls down on you at random. Epilepsy-inducing, hilarious, dangerous, colourful, demographically precise fun. What more could you ask for from the Internet? Where? http://www.k2xlgames.com/games/Avalanche2/ http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/avalanche2.php How? You can use the arrow keys or the mouse. (In two player mode, you can use A/S/D.) Guide the stick beneath the cubes as they fall. If you collect them, they're worth 200 points each. Some of them have special properties which last for a short amount of time. Each fraction of a second you remain in the game you get another 1 point. The more points you get, the higher level you attain, and the worthier you are. Red cubes are a plain and simple 200 points. You'll get lots of these. Green cubes freeze triangles. Blue cubes call up a protective umbrella for you. Black cubes make you a faster runner. Orange cubes make you 'see-through' and invincible from triangles. Magenta cubes revive your dead partner in a 2-player game. The triangles are evil and must be avoided. Hitting one makes you extremely dead. Progress through the game will trigger different environments for the stick: Level 1 - 1,000 points - Gravity will be initiated. Level 2 - 3,000 points - A smooth layer of ice will form on the ground, exacerbating your movement. Level 3 - 5,000 points - A sticky layer of mud will form on the ground, slowing you down badly. Level 4 - 7,000 points - The ground will be reset. Level 5 - 9,000 points - A hallucinogenic moving background will make it much harder to see. Level 6 - 10,000 points - Gravity will get stronger. Level 7 - 12,000 points - Gravity will get stronger still. Level 8 - 13,000 points - Ice will form again. Level 9 - 15,000 points - The ice will remain and the background will re-enter. Level 10 - 20,000 points - The ice will be replaced by mud and the background will remain. Level 11 - 25,000 points - The ground will be reset, gravity will be at its highest, and a gigantic swinging ball will cover most of the screen. After each game, your score will be checked and you will be given a letter grade and an insult/compliment as appropriate. In addition to the regular 1-player game (for which you can register a nickname and post your achievements on a high-score table), you can also play a new 2-player mode, which allows two friends to play co-operatively with each other. This version is much more sociable, and much more strategical! Only one player needs to hit the right number of points required to reach a new level, so numerically rushing ahead of your friend before reviving them is not a way to get a large combined score at the end. When? Following the success of the original, written in December 2003, the long-awaited sequel was inevitably going to come into being. It was developed and tested in early 2005, and eventually released to the public on February 5th. Why? I was drafted in part-way during the beta testing stage to write music loops for Stick Avalanche 2. Initially, the plan was to write for the main game only. I started with eight concepts, and eventually decided that the seventh was the best one for the job. It was eventually used, fourteen revisions later. I proposed re-writing the menu music that was already in place (a loop extracted from music by remix artist John Holowach). After four failed attempts at re-instrumenting the original concept, I then tried tying in the piano tune from the in-game loop into a brand new concept. This one was employed without any revisions. Before the current introductory sequence was created, there were plans for a stick to be dancing around the screen, accompanied to a remix of my never-completed retro-electronic Pointer Sisters replica Poof Juice. At some point, I decided to sit down and make the biggest, most ridiculously over-the-top orchestral minute I could possibly manage. Six demos were done, and the fifth was kept (the sixth didn't fit). This track was used behind the black-arrow animation now seen on the final version of the game. The music There are plans to extend the music into a full-length soundtrack in the future. The soundtrack will include some material that was never used in the game, such as the re-instrumented menu music and the early in-game demos. Sign up for the newsletter on the contact page, and you'll be alerted when the time comes. In the meantime, here are 128kbps copies of the three current pieces used in the game. Stick Avalanche 2 in-game concept 7, demo ZZ3 - 0:47 Stick Avalanche 2 menu demo 5 - 0:15 Stick Avalanche 2 intro sequence concept 2, demo 5 - 1:02 Edit: These tracks have since been released on the album Do Not Listen and are now available on CD and iTunes. Visit the new home page for details, or visit the music section to download the original loops. Music © 2005, Tim Halbert, all rights reserved. Merchandise http://www.cafepress.com/k2xlgames/     Stick Avalanche 2 is © 2005, Danny Miller (http://www.k2xl.com).