#Ultratron upgrade order movie

Tiny details that are completely meaningless in the context of the shooting, dodging and circling that forms the futurist idea of progress, but details that are as important as the distant horizon in your favourite RPG, or the accurately modelled dashboard of that sports car you’ll never be able to afford in real life. I just loaded it again, after writing that last sentence, and I still see new things. Is my enthusiasm for Ultratron’s tiny explosions clear? It’s a small game, self-contained arenas with a few enemy types and four bosses, but it doesn’t waste a beat of its tiny machine heart. I did manage to buy a smart bomb though, which distorted the screen and frazzled my eyeballs exactly as I’d hoped it would, and later I upgraded my main weapon and watched it slice through entire bot packs, ricocheting off walls and screaming a searing mechanical lament as it fizzed and burst. I’d thought they were debris at first, sizzling and too hot to handle, so my visit to the between-waves shop was a short one. I was on the second level before I realised that I was supposed to be collecting the glowing robot remnants.

Throwing enough particles around to make the Large Hadron Collider feel inadequate and slightly limp, it’s a prime example of a visual style that looks minimalist on a screenshot but is positively brimming over with effects once in motion. It’s certainly splendid on a computer screen. Ultratron would have been splendid in an arcade, I reckon. Sadly, for the sake of this imagined scenario, I’ve never spent a great deal of time in arcades and if I do find myself in one, I immediately attach myself to a pinball or air hockey table.

#Ultratron upgrade order movie

If I had spent my youth in arcades, maybe I’d be able to imagine finding an Ultratron cabinet in a dusty corner, shimmering through the grime, providing something pure in the midst of all the movie licenses that have become plastic guns, and the hungry change machines. I downloaded the demo and expected to play for two minutes, make sure it wasn’t obscenely broken, and then mention the release in a hundred word news post. Then, the usual a pain like needles behind my eyes, the taste of iron at the back of my throat, glimpsed memories of impossible structures. “Jim says it’s great”, I thought, even though I’d never heard Jim mention the game. It all started when the Hivemind raised a node-brow in the direction of Ultratron’s Steam and demo release.

Could I really have spent half an hour with one hand splayed across the WASD keys and the other strafing the mouse back and forth across its shabby pad, aiming the most neon of laser-death blasts at spawning squads of adorable robot-killers? I’m supposed to be playing deep and serious strategy games that would lose a race with Timothy Squints, the snail with the ten tonne shell. Did I really just destroy one of the four Robots of the Apocalypse, accompanied by a pet drone, a defence turret and a pulsing soundtrack? Then the game exploded and I’m sitting here looking at my desktop wondering if it was all some form of fever dream. When I reached the end, unhappy emoticons exploded onto the arena floor around my character, who had also exploded. Ultratron is arena-based, robot dismantling particle heaven. Sometimes, naturally, the power-up is a score-spewing giant fruit. Everything leaves glowing tracks or showers of sparks. I just noticed that the spotlights are following me and that arrows flash at the side of the arena right before a power-up twinkles into view, hovering across the screen and leaving trails of excitement.