SketchFighter 4000 Alpha finds you commanding a ship navigating a maze of twisty passages, confronting a number of enemies and bosses within a vast world that plays out in discrete named locations like "The Volcano" and "The Wasteland". As mentioned, merely touching the walls takes away small portions of your life, as does being hit by enemy fire. Your ship controls are simple: rotate left or right, thrust, reverse thrust, fire main weapon, fire secondary weapon, switch fire color, and switch secondary weapon.

One of the things you'll miss most, inherent in many of this type of game, is a Strafe option. The ability to train your weapon on a target and avoid enemy fire by strafe-moving out of the way would make this game 1000% easier -- and therein lies the challenge. As frustrating as such scenarios become, this is the chief requirement of play: learn how to move and fire. Everything depends on this mastery.

Perhaps secondary to this first necessity is learning how to decode the simplicity of the graphics. For example: I had to learn to distinguish between different types of enemy explosions that I assumed were just different flavors of visual flair -- one explosion was harmless, another was harmful. When the game consists entirely of line drawings, it's difficult to know how to determine threat.

One of the more fun aspects of this aesthetic, though, is the little touches: some medium-sized enemies leave behind little eraser-like smudges once destroyed, and exposure to new weapons reveals clever visual metaphors. For the most part, you will quickly accept the new style and stop noticing it in favor of concentrating on simply surviving.

The world is a large one, and follows what I've come to think of as Metroid Prime-style locations: you'll come across areas you can't access right away, but you'll be able to return to them later once you've picked up the right tools to gain entrance. For example, you'll begin the game with yellow-colored projectile fire; shooting at a yellow-colored barrier will open that lock, allowing access to that area. You'll then pass barriers of colors other than yellow -- you know you'll get to return later, once you've found the proper projectile color.

Destroying some enemies and some environmental objects yield repair icons that return your ship to different degrees of health. There are sporadic rings into which you can fly to save your progress through the game; when destroyed, you will return to these areas and have to start over again. Pressing the escape key pauses the game and displays a map of the area that you've visited, in context with the surroundings you've not visited yet.

SketchFighter is playable over the Internet against another opponent via a lobby in which you can choose against whom to play. What's more intriguing is the Local 2-player option, akin to Space Duel, which lets you choose between Cooperation and Competition play. Competition pits you against your opponent in attempting to collect the most points before the time runs out, but the twist is that your two ships are tethered by an elastic string of dots that makes navigation somewhat tricky. Cooperation features the same tether, but the point-gathering is cumulative.

There is a great deal of maddening, hair-tearing enjoyment to be had from SketchFighter 4000 Alpha. You can download it right here at Big Download. If you find yourself unable to progress beyond a certain area, do yourself a favor: Go back in time, find some arcade rat, and bring him back to the present to play the game for you. Vicarious victory is better than no victory at all.