Low Tide: catch what the gull drops
Kaboom! made gentle. A gull glides along the top of the screen dropping shells, and a stack of three buckets follows your finger along the sand. Every catch plays the next note of a rising run; the tide takes what you miss.
Low Tide is a catching game after Kaboom!, the 1981 Activision cartridge Larry Kaplan designed for the Atari 2600 paddle. The bombs are gone. A gull glides back and forth along the top of the field and lets shells go, and you hold a stack of three buckets on the sand. The buckets follow your finger or the mouse directly, the way a paddle did, so the game is about where your hand is, not how fast you can press. Each wave drops a fixed number of shells, ten, then fifteen, then twenty and on up, every wave faster than the last, and every catch is worth the wave number, one point up to eight. Each catch plays the next note of a rising run, the sound that made the original. Miss one and the tide comes in: the rest of that wave is washed away with a soft hush of noise, the bottom bucket goes with it, and the gull starts the wave before again. A bucket comes back every thousand points. The game keeps a mood with you, the same four words as every cabinet on the row. DAWN is warming up. FLOW is a long run of catches. In RUSH the gull flies faster, raster bars fill the border, and now and then a golden shell turns up worth five. DRIFT follows a miss: the shells fall slower and the buckets widen. On the CALM dial no bucket is ever lost and the game never ends. Pick the Atari 800XL or the Commodore 64 blue, each with its own boot screen. Nothing is emulated or copied; the gull, the shells, the music and the palettes were made for this page. Your best score and mood stay in your browser, and Cabinet Row lights this cabinet with them. [Play Low Tide](/low-tide). [The rules as JSON](/low-tide.json). [Walk Cabinet Row](/cabinet-row).
