Deflex

Here is another of my turn of  the century games intended for use on Pocket PC devices but played more on the PC in the end. If it was played at all. It's had various incarnations over the years, on everything through the PET, Vic, ZX81, Speccy and beyond. At its core it's a really simple game, being entirely controlled by two buttons; in this implementation we've extended it into what you might call a "dexterity puzzle" style of game, as you have to work out what to do on each level and then guide the ball accordingly.

Deflex originally came about as a modification to the PET game "Target Pong", from 1978.

"Target PONG", Commodore PET, 1978

The objective was to deflect a ball into a target (represented by the hollow circle)  by placing deflectors in its path - / and \ - each of which deflected its path by 90 degrees in a direction determined by the ball's current direction. If you look at the PET's keyboard, specifically the N and M keys, you'll see the symbols for the two deflectors there; those two keys became the game's control buttons.

The N and M buttons placed the two deflectors.

Us nerds at 6th form liked this game, but found that very quickly the ball became locked in short repeating paths rather quickly. So we added a modification such that every time the ball bounced off a deflector, as well as altering the ball's trajectory, the deflector would also "flip" into its opposite state, / becoming \ and vice versa. This led to much more interesting trajectories without the possibility of being locked into short loops. This variant became "Deflex".

In the version presented here the core gameplay is the same, with the / and \ deflectors being placed by using the left and right mouse buttons respectively. I added a time limit and a succession of levels with variations such as walls as obstacles, moving targets, targets that need hit in a particular order and suchlike, to provide a bit of variation on the extremely basic gameplay.

On this level you must hit the Welsh flags in a specific order.

Hitting a target out of sequence results in a Clumsy Donkey Error and loss of a life.

Here you must eliminate a herd of Queen Mothers which skitter about trying to avoid your balls.

Hitting a target extends the time limit and allows extended play.

On this level you must hit the goat plushies whilst avoiding the sheepie plushies.

As usual there is an unnecessarily verbose page explaining the gameplay strategies here.

Like the other two games from that era I've put up, this is dead simple stuff and should hopefully run without issue even on a modern windows system.