What is it?
Maybe no product was advertised as vehemently with the help of various computer media as the 1998 Volkswagen New Beetle. You could drive it in racing games or watch it in screensavers, and it even got a puzzle game all of its own. For that, Volkswagen commissioned Mario Knezovic to rewrite his five year old Commodore 64 game Stone Age.
The puzzles remained the same escept for some cosmetic changes, but the excellent graphics by Kay Tenneman were brand new. New Beetle Tracks & Gaps was released both for the 16 and 32-bit Windows platforms. The two versions are completely identical. This was probably the reason that the 32-bit version did not use DirectX, though the game does not run in a window. If your screen resolution is higher than 800×600, the rest of the screen is black.
Playing the Game
The menus of the game are in German only. The most important interface element is the icon in the bottom right corner which takes you to this menu. Here are the entries, with translations:
- Hilfe zum Spiel
- Help. Pointless if you don't understand German, of course.
- Eigenen Levelsatz laden
- Load your own level set.
- Level-Editor
- Level editor. You can create your own levels and password-protect them so they can't be edited. I couldn't quite figure out its controls.
- Optionen
- Options. The only thing you can do here is toggle sound effects and music.
- Highscores anzeigen
- Show highscores.
- Credits
- Credits.
- Spiel starten
- Start game.
- Level-Paßwort eingeben
- Enter level password. New Beetle Tracks & Gaps actually uses this antiquated system.
- Spiel beenden
- Exit.
The controls are not exactly intuitive, but easy to get used to. You select the car or a movable tile by left-clicking on it. Then you left-click where you want it to move. There is no pathfinding for the car, it will only travel in a straight line. Before you select something else, you must deselect the current unit by clicking the right mouse button. If a tile cannot move any more, it is automatically deselected.
