Solarwolf

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SolarWolf is an action/arcade game written by Pete Shinners. It is free and open source, created with the Pygame game development library.

According to the author's website, his own personal best score is "in the 40's." The best reported score on the same website is 15 ships and 26 skips. Scores as low as 13 ships with 25 skips have been reported on various websites.

[edit] Gameplay

The object of the game is to pilot your ship with the arrow keys and collect all of the cubes in the level. However, while doing this, four enemy fighers (one of each side of the screen), will fire fireball-like rockets at you, which will cost you a life when hit. Each level has a timer on the right side; should the player complete the level before the timer runs out, they can skip the next level entirely.

As the game goes on, more challenges ensue. The enemies fire more fireballs, obstacles such as asteroids and spike mines appear (which colliding with them costs the player a life), and yellow blocks (which require two passes to collect) and red blocks (requiring three passes) start to appear. Later in the game, a hidden spike mine could emerge from any yellow or red block.

During the game there are several power-ups that the player may collect. These power ups include an increase in the skip level timer, an immediately dissolving of all enemy fireballs presently on screen, the destruction of one of the four enemy ships, a shield (which protects your ship temporarily from fireballs only), an extra life, and a slow-animation power-up (which temporarily puts the game in slow animation to make it less tense for the player).

Once the player runs out of lives, the game is over; however he can later continue the game from a saved file menu.