Dart 'm Up
for PC (Windows)

Mr Creosote:Popular Vote:
2/6
Company: Dommelsch
Year: 1999
Genre: Sport, Simulation
Theme: Individual Sports / Multiplayer / Promotional
Language: English
Licence: Freeware
Views: 33999
Review by Mr Creosote (2002-01-05)
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Every sport has been converted into a computer game already. Football, basketball, ice hockey and so on. Then there are some 'sports' which aren't really sports at all! Like for example motor racing, fishing, chess or...... darts. All these have one thing in common: no athletic ability is needed. So why call them sports then? Well, maybe so that the people doing it can proudly say I'm doing sports ;)

Of course, these 'non-sports' have also all been converted into computer games. Formula One Grand Prix, Basstour, Fritz - those are examples of the 'non-sports' mentioned above. And darts? Never heard of any commercial program. It's a big thing in the freeware scene though. Or was for some time. All these games are extremely alike, and they're all very simple.

Dart 'm Up isn't a product of the freeware scene. It's a promotial game for the brewery Dommelsch, just like its 'cousins' Pool 'm Up and Roll 'm Up. It features the same basic functionality (including High Score-uploads), decent (but static) graphics and minimalist sound.

The question why it is worse than its relatives can easily be answered. Darts is just nothing which can properly be done in a computer game! The programmers of this particular game tried it like this: you roughly aim at the board with the mouse - without any technical help, just 'by-eye'. Some experience is needed for that. Then you click the mouse button and hold it down. A cross flies over the board vertically and once you release the button, the dart flies to where the cross pointed then. There is only very few fine tuning possible in horizontal direction after the mouse has been clicked.

This method works ok, it's not worse than in other darts games. But it is simply not demanding enough! After five minutes, you know where to aim horizontally, the rest is a piece of cake anyway.

To make it even less interesting, Dart 'm Up doesn't feature any different game modes. There is just one for a single or two players. But even that is not the usual 301 or 501! Instead, there's just a list of every number over 10 (and bullseye) and you have to hit every number three times (or hit the tripled field of each number once of course). Hitting a number you don't need decreases your score. So the goal is to hit all the targets in as few throws as possible.

Once you've managed that, there is a small 'bonus level' in which you have to hit a few targets in a limited amount of time. Yawn...

All this sounds very negative and that is what the game deserves indeed! But I should point out that this is not the fault of the Dommelsch designers. Darts just doesn't belong to a sterile hard disk, but in a smoky pub...

Comments (2) [Post comment]

Marko:

It sounds as though the reviewer didn't give enough time to learn the unusual controls.

This was made a long time ago and yet it's still the best darts game out there!

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