What makes a game fun? What makes a game entertaining despite its uncanny resemblance to prior incarnations of similar games? In his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, game designer Raph Koster suggested that part of what makes games appealing are the patterns, because our minds tend to embrace the struggle to master a new or unfamiliar pattern. At the same time, however, Koster noted that we have a tendency to enjoy games which offer new puzzles within a familiar paradigm — thus the seemingly odd spectacle of seeing reviews in which the reviewer speaks of "tired formulas" or "breathing new life into an old genre" even as fans continue to gobble up the games in question.

I mean, Halo is fun not because it is so different from Quake or Doom but because it actually respects the things that make such games fun: namely, interesting scenery, nasty bad guys, and big guns to blow 'em all to smithereens. We seem to like new twists, but that doesn't mean we always want entirely "new" structures of play.

Which brings me to the subject of this review. While it was first released for the Mac several years ago, Deimos Rising remains a fun, frantic game that harkens back to the arcade games of my youth, when the goal was to see how long you could last on one quarter (suffice it to say I never lasted as long as one friend of mine, who could milk what seemed like hours of game play from one tiny coin).

Basically, Deimos Rising is a vertical scrolling shooter, and it honors the things that made those games such monumental time-eaters (some fools might say "time-wasters," but then they don't know of what they speak).

I recently tried the Windows port of the game (available in a shareware version from Ambrosia Software). The "sequel" to a 1990s shareware game called Mars Rising, the game's basic format is simple: you have to fly your little ship (whatever it is, be it a star fighter or some sort of pseudo-military combat fighter, I'm really not quite sure) along a variety of landscapes and blow stuff up before they take you out. Yup, that's pretty much it. But it is just as possible to reduce virtually any game to a seemingly simplistic common denominator, so that really doesn't quite do justice to the game — nor define why it is so much fun.