Kaboom4K (4092 bytes)
This game came in 13th place out of 55 with a score of 84.7143.
NOTE: If you play the Webstart version of the game, you will be asked to accept a self-signed certificate. This is required due to the fact that the game uses the sun.audio package to generate sound. If you don't want to accept the certificate, you can play the JAR version, which does not require it.
Vaguely inspired by the old Activision "Kaboom!" game. Asteroids are being dropped instead of bombs. The playfield is wrapped into a circle, instead of horizontal. Instead of getting three or four lives (the buckets), you get six hits on the planet. And the guy in stripes is just a blue circle. If this game were "unwrapped" so that the planet's surface was a horizontal line at the bottom of the screen, and the asteroid-dropping alien moved back and forth along the top of the screen, with your blue "paddle" in the middle, it would essentially be Kaboom. One major difference is that in Kaboom, as you loose buckets, the game gets harder. In my game, as asteroids hit the planet, the gameplay is unaffected (the game just gets faster over time whether or not you sustain any hits).
The game includes a psuedo-3D starfield background, procedural sound, a particle system, and a terrain generator. The procedural sound means that if you play the WebStart version you need to accept a self-signed certificate when playing. No such limitation if you play the JAR version.
The game is controlled with the mouse, and is fairly intuitive.
There is only one level, which simply gets progressively harder. Like the original "Kaboom!", there is no way to really beat the game - it's just a question of how high a score you can get before the end.
Each replay generates a new terrain.