Hover! was one of the first Windows 95 games that came bundled with Microsoft's then new operating system, alongside such classics as Solitaire and Minesweeper. The 3D looks incredibly dated today, with sprite-based graphics like Doom, but Hover! can still be a lot of fun.

In Hover!, you take control of a floating red bumper car going through mazes to collect blue flags. There are also blue bumper cars called drones that search for the red flags. Whoever gets all their flags first, wins. Later levels add more flags and more drones and more elaborate mazes, making things increasingly difficult after the first few levels. While you can't actually do anything about the drones, they can't do much to hurt you, either.

Mazes tend to have two tiers and stairs that can be used to get from one to the other. It's even possible to drop from one tier to the other at certain locations. There are also traps on the floor to watch out for. Green traps propel the bumper car in any direction at a very high speed, usually into a wall to bounce off of. The red traps make it unable to move for a few seconds until they disappear.

Hover!

You can pick up power-ups that do a number of things. They can speed up the car, slow down enemy drones, make it possible to jump, put up a wall, or make you invisible. The invisibility is particularly useful, as drones like to ram into you to knock you off course as much as possible. It won't do any damage, as everything in Hover! is indestructible, but it can be annoying. Some power-ups, however, are actually bad. The bad ones can slow you down, remove the mini map, or take away one of the previously collected flags. The latter one especially is very cheap, as it's usually positioned right in front of a place where you need to go. Fortunately, it is not very common.

There are three different maze tile sets in Hover!. The first one looks like a castle, the second is a futuristic city, and the third a tunnel. The tunnel looks especially interesting, as it features nuclear radiation symbols and octopus tentacles on certain walls. There's also a strange red-textured maze that seems to have been cut from the game, but exists in the code. It can be seen whenever a game is started, but none of the levels actually uses this texture.

Hover! consists of 16 rounds, but they're really the same three stages repeated over and over again with different numbers of flags to collect and drones to avoid. Once a maze has been memorized, all levels based upon it end up being very easy, limiting the replay value immensely. It's still a fun game to come back to every now and then, and a neat little look back at early 3D games and early Windows 95 games. Hover! not only runs in Win95, though, but also in any other version that followed after it, and it is freely available for download from Microsoft's FTP server.

Title Screen

After nearly twenty years, the promise of a sequel for Hover! hinted at in the original's help file was finally brought to fruition... as an advertising campaign for a new version of Internet Explorer. Yay. Although published by Microsoft, this new version was developed by Dan Church, with assistance from Pixel Labs as an online game to show off WebGL support for Internet Explorer. The biggest draw of this new version has to be the multiplayer, allowing for up to eight players on two teams to race for the flags. Despite being pushed as part of an Internet Explorer campaign, it will run in any WebGL-capable browser (the pictures for this article were taken while playing in Google Chrome) so it isn't hard to get a game up and running. The real problem then immediately rears its head: the maps are unchanged from the original, where they clearly weren't designed for multiplayer. Don't expect to get more than a few rounds of enjoyment out of the new Hover! in multiplayer, because the tight maps mean a lot of bumping and a lot of people who played the original knowing exactly where all the flags are going to spawn. What could have been a great updating of the mechanics for a frantic multiplayer game feels more like a cheap fan mod.

Really, it's amazing how little was actually changed for this version of Hover!. There's three vehicles to pick from, now. The slow and controllable Chicago, the all-arounder Wizard (the closest to the feel of the original), and fast but slippery Bambi (the name is a cute touch, referencing the developer credits cheat of the original game). Beyond that, the levels, powerups, and mechanics are entirely unchanged. It's still the same old Hover!.

"But why is that a bad thing?" some might argue. "The original Hover! was great fun". And it was. But the new Hover isn't the same, not inside at least. The levels in the original Hover! each had a unique look to them, with a castle, future city, and radioactive sewer system on offer. In the remake, you have... metal walls with a brick pattern, metal walls with purple lines, and metal walls with green glowing bits. The levels lack all of the personality and charm of the original, despite being more consistant with the futuristic setting. The music, too, is a substantial step down, trading the MIDI tracks of the original for a single grating guitar loop that sounds like it was pulled from the stock sound effects on Windows Movie Maker. It doesn't even loop properly. And don't plan on chasing high scores in single player anymore. After the first three levels, the game unceremoniously ends, asking you to share the game with your friends. Of course, the game proudly features its Facebook and Twitter links on the title screen and in-game.

Because that's really all this game is. It's a cold, lifeless corpse dug up from Microsoft's graveyard with a new coat of paint tossed on as part of a cheap marketing gimmick, only existing as part of a social media campaign to get people excited for fucking Internet Explorer. No one's still playing the new Hover! because without the retro-cool style or high score chasing fun of the original, there really isn't much point any more, especially when the original is still available, and still works perfectly fine for the game's fans. Forget about the new Hover!, because I can guaruntee you Microsoft already has.