20 Aug 2026
A color-based PC shmup from the mid 2000s.
Yesterday was the birthday of The Virtual Moose blog runner Michael Klamerus, and they posed a Birthday Blog Challenge to write about an obscure game. I had a good think about it, and a few came to mind but didn’t make the cut. Sorry, Warning Forever, I love you but you have a Wiki page and that’s not obscure enough.
There was a wealth of free, fun, and extremely creative PC games floating around back in the 2000s. You had DarkBASIC, Gamemaker, and Games Factory/Multimedia Fusion 2 enabling game making and producing so many titles that are now lost to time except for some random Games folder on an old drive. Mono is one of them, made by Binary Zoo back in 2005 in DarkBASIC Pro with pseudo-twin stick shooter controls designed for its mouse and keyboard environment.
The game’s goal is to get the playfield to go from one color extreme to another, either black to white or white to black. Each time you shoot a color sphere, that color is added to the playfield. Shoot a red ball, that spot is now a bit more red. Shoot a blue ball over the same spot, now it looks purple. The catch is that as you’re coloring the field, the three colors that are painted will affect any orbs that fly over them. Red spots will make enemies more likely to shoot you, green spots make them move faster, and blue spots will make them home in on you. This gets extremely chaotic when your coverage percentage is getting over 50 percent and a good chunk of the field is enemy buffs and it’s only going to get more hectic.
It’s an extremely simple premise but it gets mesmerizing as the game goes on and can really get distracting (in a good way) when you’re dodging around enemies to grab an upgrade before it disappears. You can see from below a few of my latest attempts. The darker spots littered over those playfields are from when I got hit, that undoes a bit of progress around you.
Binary Zoo’s site is long down, but you can still find a copy of Mono for PC over at the Internet Archive (CYA: I recommend being safe and running it in a sandbox) that should run fine. I was able to get it running with Wine so playing it on Linux shouldn’t be a problem! The music’s good, but if you get bored of it they added in an extra neat feature where you can toss MP3s in the My Music folder and those will play during gameplay instead. Give it a play, hopefully me writing about it will dig it out of some obscurity!
There’s a few new links over in the Cool Links section, plus a new widget to see other blogs in the Warp Point webring! Go click on those and check them out, there’s a bunch of cool stuff to read there!
