Fourth Power

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Fourth Power
Fourthpower.png
Author Tabris / Ghent / Wervyn
Company None
Release Date 2001
Genre Side-scroller
Download No link available.

Fourth Power was a game made for the Weekend of Zeux 2001 competition; it received first-place. The game revolves around a freelancer trying to discover the conspiracy behind an outbreak of disappearing people.

The game is presented as a side-scrolling platformer with four stages and one boss level. The enemies in these levels are spawned randomly and constantly, and will usually seek the player blindly, ignoring any obstacles in their path, and damage the player upon touching them. To combat these enemies, the player is armed with a gun that can also be aimed upwards.

Stages

Stage 1 has the player approaching a government building from the nearby forest. Upon reaching the building and peering inside from a rooftop window, the player discovers that the government are too busy smoking weed to be responsible for the disappearances.

Next, the player visits an evil corporation that manufactures exploding toasters, and discovers that they are merely running a copy of Blindows (the scenario is a jab at Microsoft and also the old screen-saver application After Dark, most famously known for flying toasters).

In the third stage, the player infiltrates an alien ship, only to find that these so-called "aliens" are only obsessive X-Files fans.

After completing all these stages (which can be done in any order), the player discovers that Megazeux itself (represented as a gigantic default smiley and introduced in a scene inspired by the Day of Lavos from Chrono Trigger) is responsible for abducting people. The player must fight through the guts of Megazeux and confront the master program itself, which takes the form of a giant environmental boss that attacks with classic Robotic commands such as avalanche and laybomb high to BENEATH. The boss has a more traditional second stage where the player simply has to kill a giant enemy. After finally defeating Megazeux, the game ends with a mock Blue Screen of Death as the program has encountered a "fatal error".