Turbo Pudding
Every planet in the Airwaves galaxy used to be a radio station with its own song. Then Monotone decided the universe needs only one sound, and his Jammers started switching the stations off. Here is who you meet in Loudnik’s first three stations, on both sides of the dial.
Volta, the last voice on the air
DJ Volta runs the last pirate station, from a little ship. Her hideout is Pirate Cove, among old relay towers, and that is where the game begins: the Jammers have found it and covered it with a Dish.
Her ship is shaped like an arrowhead with a speaker cone in the middle, and the cone swells a little on every beat of the song. The white dot at its center is the only part an enemy bullet can hit. On the back edge of each wing sit five tiny equalizer bars that light up in your weapon’s color, one bar per level.
Volta doesn’t carry guns, she carries tapes. Beat fires short shots in pairs, Chord a wide fan of notes, Solo a beam, Trill notes that find their own target, and Bass arcs that grow as they fly. Her bombs are records: Drop, for one, is a bass hit that turns enemy bullets into notes. Power up a tape and the game cheers: “LOUDER!”
Bobina, the cassette robot
Bobina is Volta’s cassette robot, and the first face you see. On the title screen, Bobina sits right above the Play button: a white cassette with a yellow label, a little fin on top, two reels for eyes and a strip of tape for a smile. The reels turn, the cassette sways, and every few seconds it blinks.
Bobina gets the last word after Bell Garden, the third station, and it is a very practical one: “We need a new antenna… and a little more nerve.”
Monotone, who likes one note
Monotone is a conductor machine. He has decided there is only one right sound in the universe, a clean A at 440 hertz, and that everything else is noise. He is a smooth white ball with one flat line for a face and two conductor’s batons for arms.
He never shouts. His lines appear in gray monospace, polite and flat. After you free the Disco Rings, he reports: “Noise detected. Noise will be removed.” After Bell Garden, he has just four words for you: “Your broadcast is closed.”
His flat line is everywhere. Every station starts washed out in his gray, and the color comes back as you shoot his Jammers down. On the map of the Airwaves, a running wave joins the stations you have freed, and his flat gray line runs on past them. Even the game’s logo has it: under the word Loudnik, a flat gray line turns into a wave.
The Jammers
Monotone’s army is made of matte gray machines, each with one red “rec” light. The light blinks once a second and swells just before a Jammer fires, which is your cue to move. Their shapes tell you what they do: sharp ones ram, round ones spin and fire rings, blocky ones are armored, and gold trim means loot.
They also dress for the job. At Pirate Cove they wear whip antennas, in the Disco Rings sequins that catch the light, and in Bell Garden a streamer that flies in the wind. Shoot one down and it pops into confetti in the station’s colors, with a few white notes floating up.
The bosses of the free stations
Each of the first three stations has a mid-boss and a boss. At Pirate Cove, Patrol “Shh” is a flat gray saucer with a loudspeaker horn pointing down. The horn breathes in, then lets out a slow ring. The Jammer Dish that covers the cove is a radar dish on a truss, 60 percent of the screen wide. It scans from side to side, glows for half a second and fires where it looks. Aim for the red emitter at its focus.
In the Disco Rings, the Overseer Console is a gray DJ desk with two turntables. Two vinyl shields circle its screen and block your shots, so you aim through the gaps. Then comes the Mirror Warden, the planet’s own mirror ball, which Monotone has turned into a searchlight.
Bell Garden belongs to the wind. The Weathervane is an arrow on a ball that turns to face you, fires a line of five and blows a gust your way. Behind it waits the Wind Organ, a floating fortress of nine pipes with a keyboard below. Monotone silenced it, and the wind died down. Now its pipes light up one by one, like a tune, and each lets out a column of notes. Aim for the glowing keys.
Beat a station’s boss, and the station goes back on the air, song and all.
Tune in
The first three stations are free to play in your browser at loudnik.com. The full game, all ten stations, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Loudnik page.
