0.2, INTERCEPT
There's a fourth game in Crash The Stack, and this time it isn't a puzzle! INTERCEPT is a rhythm game: packets fall down four lanes, and you catch each one as it hits the line, on the beat of the song. You'll find it in FREE PLAY, right under SCAN.
On a keyboard you play with D, F, J and K, the index and middle fingers of both hands, so your fingers never leave the home row. (F and J have the little bumps, so you can find them without looking.) On a phone it's four wide pads along the bottom of the screen, two for each thumb. Your left hand mostly keeps the beat and your right hand plays the tune.
The songs are five tracks from the game's own soundtrack: Black Glass, Blind Spot, Sector Drift, Clock Edge and Glass Current. Nobody charted them by hand. The soundtrack is made of tracker tunes that Crash plays live, so the game knows exactly which notes the kick, the snare and the melody play and when, and it builds each chart from the song itself. Every packet you catch is a note you can actually hear.
There are three difficulties, SCRIPT KID, RUNNER and ELITE, and all of them use the same four lanes. What changes is how busy the chart is, how fast the packets fall, and the patterns. SCRIPT KID never asks for two keys at once. RUNNER adds pairs. ELITE throws in quick repeats on a single key and lets the melody cross over onto your left hand.
Each hit is graded SYNC, CLEAN or LOSSY, and a miss is a DROP. Hits build a combo that multiplies your score up to four times, and they keep your SIGNAL up; drop too many and the signal runs out and the link is severed. The bar across the top fills as the song plays, with small marks where the song changes sections, so you always know how much of the transmission is left, and it counts the packets you've captured so far.
You're judged on what you hear
Rhythm games live or die on timing, and this is where I spent the most time. The music is prepared a fraction of a second before it reaches your speakers, and your sound hardware adds a delay of its own on top. INTERCEPT takes both into account, using the delay your browser reports, so a tap on the beat you hear counts as on the beat.
Some setups add more delay than they admit to, and Bluetooth headphones are the big one. For those there's CALIBRATE on the song screen: it plays a steady click, you tap along, and it sets your OFFSET from your taps. Nothing moves on the screen while it runs, and that's on purpose, because it's measuring your ears and not your eyes. If you switch to Bluetooth headphones, or back to speakers, run CALIBRATE again. You can also nudge OFFSET by hand on the same screen.
On a phone there's a pause button in the top left corner, and Escape pauses on a keyboard. From there you can resume, retry the song, or go back to the song list.
SCAN gets its HACKER version
SCAN now has a VERSION row like STACK and DEFRAG. CLASSIC is the Minesweeper from 0.1.3. In HACKER, scanning ICE no longer ends the board: it spikes the trace instead, and the ICE stays on the board, marked, while you keep going. The trace runs against the clock, just as it does on the other two tables.
HACKER also gives you PROBE. Press O (or ctrl+P on the host under the cursor), then pick a host you're unsure about: if it's ICE, the probe defuses it instead of letting it hit you. A probe costs a third of what a hit costs, so a coin flip is worth probing and a fairly safe guess isn't.
When the trace completes, the ICE starts fighting back. It can firewall a 3x3 sector so it refuses your scans, cover six of your numbers with noise, or wipe a 4x4 sector you've already scanned back to hidden. It never lies to you, though: every number on the screen is the true count, and the board still never needs a guess.
If you played SCAN in 0.1.3, it stays on CLASSIC for you, and new players start on HACKER. Either way, the VERSION row switches it.
SCAN in the hub
SCAN is part of JACK IN now. From the second layer down, some of the nodes in the hub are SCAN nodes, drawn as a dish so you can tell them apart from the STACK and DEFRAG cabinets. Hacking one maps the layer around it and shows you where the nearby daemons are looking for a while, which makes it the node you hack when you want to see the route ahead. On deeper layers, some things stay hidden until you scan them: the way down, or a node you need. A SCAN node's board has marked hosts to EXTRACT, and clearing their neighborhoods is the job. The probes you pick up in the hub work on SCAN boards too.
Smaller things
Clicking a number whose flags don't add up used to do nothing at all. Now the hosts it would sweep flash and the bar tells you it needs its flags, and holding a press on a number shows its hidden neighbors pushed in, the way Windows did. A right-click on a number sweeps it too. When you've placed more flags than there is ICE, the bar tells you how many of them must be on clean hosts, and when the counter reads zero but the segment isn't mapped, it tells you a flag is wrong.
STACK, DEFRAG and SCAN now share the same end-of-game panel, and you can move through its choices with the arrow keys (or j and k) and pick one with Enter or Space.
The sound effects used to stop dead at the end, which could make them sound like a broken sample. They fade out properly now.
There's more on the way for Crash, but this felt like a good place to stop and play. I hope you have fun catching some packets!