skysenshi.com

Last Friday, I was invited to a casual game-related event, which I almost wasn’t able to attend because it coincided with my contract-signing with a video gaming company that I shall temporarily call…”Shadow”. (Hehe, At least until I formally start on May 1.) Thank goodness the signing was pretty quick and the location is literally just a few blocks away.

The casual game being launched? Snickers Hungerlings Attack! But first, I was handed this camouflage net.

I had no idea what to do with this at first, so I figured I could see what the other bloggers were up to before finding out what this was for.

This was the sight that greeted me:

Everyone was in full concentration. I was wondering how fun this would be, considering that I am not a casual gamer.

Some of them were actually getting frustrated, mostly because they wanted to beat the high score. The owner of Philippine Blog Awardee back2gaming.com is the lucky dude that holds the title.

Yup, there he is on that monitor, playing with the webcam settings. What’s really amazing about all this is that that particular laptop was the most lag-prone unit. I nearly tore my hair out in exasperation. Yet he was able to get the fastest time with it.

Finally knew what to do with the camouflage net. Haha! This took me back to my Level Up days, when I’d run through QA several times just to see if a game is functioning as it should. Darn, still couldn’t get anywhere near the top score.

The object of the game? Well, the people behind Snickers has this theory that our hunger has something to do with our temper. (No need to do a longitudinal study for this one. It has been proven. Haha!) Whenever we’re really hungry, we turn into monsters like the Hungerlings. So we need to fill ourselves up with Snickers bars — avoiding the bad chocolates and the bombs — in order to become human again.

Here’s the home interface of the game website. (I find this prettier than the actual game itself.) It’s also very informative as it also provides you with Snickers’ nutritional facts.

Well, my eyes immediately zeroed in on the prizes, which top scorers can get hold of:

• Grand – PS3 x 3
• 2nd – HP Mini x 3
• 3rd – Casio G-Shock Watches x 9

The game consists of two tracks, one utilizes the keyboard (just regular arrows, which is good for casual gaming). The other utilizes the webcam. The former would be the easiest way to go about this, but the latter requires a lot of patience and fast connectivity. It was quite an interesting experience, though.

I actually found a few minor bugs. My character got stuck on the left wall and did some sort of weird spasmodic dance moves. I didn’t experience this on the Windows-based laptop, so I’m guessing my Mac’s controls have something to do with it.

Because he got stuck, he just ate everything — Snickers, bad chocolates, bombs and all. Of course, I replayed this several times because I’m OC that way.

I gave up after about five tries, though.

*Sigh* 18 seconds. That’s 5 seconds away from the top score. *Sigh*

Anyway, congratulations to the winners!! Here they are: