by Jamie Craig

Created on: April 16, 2009

Laser Dolphin is a game created and sold by "dingogames.com" for $19.95. It took seconds for me to download it, even on my relatively poor internet connection as the file was only 3.1MB, which gave me the impression that the game would remarkably short and considering the price for the full game was almost $20 it did not fill me with high hopes. The installation was quick and easy; I accepted the license agreement and chose where to place my file and the game installed in what couldn't have been more than 5 seconds.

Starting up the game I was confronted with a fairly simple yet cheap looking menu screen, as well as the repetitive and annoying theme music which seems to accompany so many downloadable titles. Needless to say I went straight to the options section, turned the music down completely, opened iTunes and put some of my own music on instead. There wasn't a help section for me to use in the menu so I was left guessing as to the purpose of the game.

Starting the "Action" mode of the game I was still befuddled as to what I was trying to achieve. It was at this point that I was confronted by a simplistic and somewhat cheesy comic strip outlining the story of the game. Apparently the prime minister of England has been abducted by aliens and his only hope is your character... a dolphin with a laser on his back. This is perhaps a point towards Douglas Adams' novels, either that or just a very strange idea that someone tried to base a game upon. I later discovered some seconds later that the story, as poor as it was, actually has nothing to do with the gameplay whatsoever.

The gameplay was at first confusing, and despite me being an avid gamer I spent a few minutes on the first screen collecting "Gold Dolphins" and swimming about trying to interpret where I was supposed to go, until I accidentally floated off the screen and realised that that was the point of the game all along. The controls of the game are a bit strange (as well as hard to master on a touchpad), they consist of pointing your mouse where you want to go and then holding the spacebar to propel yourself. You can also shoot your laser cannon towards mines and enemies to kill them so that they cannot deal you any damage. The gameplay is incredibly unoriginal however; in fact I would go as far to say that the game would have been dated had it featured on the PS1 (or perhaps even its predecessors), let alone as a game costing $19.95 for the PC in the current next-gen climate.

There are nothing wrong with

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