Captain Binary

The Good
Quite nice music

The Bad
Terrible English

Terrible gameplay

Overall shoddy execution

The Bottom Line
Captain Binary has been made by students of the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, who are obviously proud of their work, what with the school's logo being prominently displayed in the opening credits and the school appearing in the background of the first level. What a pity, then, that this pride is most unjustified.

First fun fact: you cannot skip the opening credits. Every time, you start the game, you have to sit through three rather ugly pictures to be told for the umpteenth time that, yes, the programmers are still Filip Starzyński and Konstanty Kalicki (or maybe Falicki, hard to tell with this ridiculous Gothic font).

The game can be downloaded in both English and Polish versions, but the only difference between the two seem to be the subtitles in the intro and the readme file. You can tell, though, that the authors aren't exactly well-versed in English: we learn, for instance, that our hero has a limited amount of "lifes" and he better not "loose" them all; but on the other hand, "its good idea to play agressively". Awesome.

The gameplay itself is hardly enjoyable. First of all, everything flickers. The aliens' corpses flicker, and Binary himself flickers like hell after he loses a life and respawns. One can quickly get a bad case of migraine by playing this game. Survival isn't an easy thing; with everything flickering, tons of projectiles fired from all sides and the controls being impossible to redefine (fun fact two: the controls are contained within the readme file inside the installation folder, and the game itself doesn't have any sort of a help screen or anything), you'll find the good Captain dying quickly and then resuming his post-mortem flickering, just in case you didn't hate your life enough yet. Also consider that the aliens often come unexpectedly from beyond the edge of the screen while Binary happens to be standing next to this edge, thus immediately killing him without any time to react, and you get the idea.

The only good thing about this game is that the music is pretty nice and the graphics aren't too shabby. But that doesn't make up for the terrible gameplay at all.