PuffCamp: War of the PuffBalls

Puffballs may be cute and cuddly little bouncy creatures, but when they go to war, it is not pretty. Several Puffballs are being held as prisoners on a remote island camp. These POWs, or Puffballs of War, must be rescued.

The island is protected by a magnetic shield, but one person can slip through aboard a small motorboat. Your mission is to rescue all ten prisoners and then enter the main bunker to bring down the shield.

Each prisoner is locked in a separate cell, and the keycard needed to free them has been broken into four pieces and given to different guards. You will need to explore the island, fight your way through its defenders, recover the pieces and assemble each keycard.

Once all ten POWs are free, the final task is to find a way into the bunker and disable the shield.

The higher the difficulty, the more points you can earn for special accomplishments.

PuffCamp: War of the PuffBalls was released in 2001 by Senator Games, Inc., a small independent Windows shareware developer active in the early 2000s. For such a small shareware release, the game had an unusually ambitious structure, combining arcade combat, exploration and puzzle solving. Weapons could be upgraded, while items improved health, firing strength and firing speed. The keycard system added a puzzle layer to the action, and different difficulty settings affected both challenge and scoring. Later versions also included online multiplayer features, giving the game an even broader scope.

None of these ideas were revolutionary on their own, but together they made PuffCamp more elaborate than many small arcade shareware games of its era. Senator Games later released other unusual PC titles, including Bad Folkers!, Now Hear This! and Infect: The Prison Infection Saga, and eventually produced educational and family oriented software under the Senator Games Educational name.

Source: Itai’s Game Preservation Research