A gull glides along the top of the screen and lets shells go. You hold a stack of three buckets on the sand. It is Kaboom! with the bombs taken out: the same climb, the same rising run of notes, and a tide instead of an explosion.
Mood, both ways
The game keeps two numbers with you. Every catch raises its energy. A shell lost to the tide lowers its calm. Time brings both back toward the dial you set. Four words name where it is.
- DAWN warming up. Cool shells, a slow major arpeggio, slightly wide buckets.
- FLOW a long run of catches. Bright shells, the music opens up.
- RUSH the gull flies faster, raster bars fill the border, and now and then a golden shell worth five times as much.
- DRIFT after the tide takes one. The shells fall slower, the buckets widen, the notes thin out.
Your side is the dial: CALM (no bucket is ever lost and the game never ends); PLAY (three buckets, one back every 1000 points); RUSH (starts hot, leans into golden shells). The game relaxes toward it, and when you leave after a game, it hands its mood to the town.
Two machines
ATARI 800XL (1983, POKEY). Graphics 0 blue with a black border and light-blue text. Raw square waves, in the POKEY spirit. READY, then RUN "D:LOWTIDE".
COMMODORE 64 (1982, SID). The blue field inside a light-blue border. A resonant filter sweep on every voice, in the SID spirit. The banner, then LOAD"LOW TIDE",8,1.
Nothing is emulated and nothing is copied: no Activision art, names or characters. The gull, the shells, the music and the palettes were made for this page. Read the note on Kaboom! that it grew from.
The rules
Waves drop 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60 shells, then 60 from then on, each wave faster than the last. A catch is worth the wave number, one point up to eight. Miss one and the tide washes the rest of that wave away, takes the bottom bucket, and the gull starts the wave before again. A bucket comes back every 1000 points.
Controls
- The buckets follow the mouse or your finger across the field, like a paddle. Tap or click to start a wave.
- Keys: ← → or A D move, Space starts a wave, P pauses, F full screen, M sound, C scanlines, 1 and 2 switch machines, 3 turns the dial.
- FULL uses the Fullscreen API. iOS Safari has none for pages, so the stage fills the screen instead.