What happens when you mix an arcade style shoot-’em-up with a rhythm game and then do it all backwards? You get the delightful (and difficult) Retro/Grade. Originally released as an indie game on the PlayStation 3, Retro/Grade has made the jump to PC.
Rhythm games and shoot-em-ups have been done before so the base genres are well represented in gaming. However, they’ve never been done like this.
One of the greatest indie games of all-time is Bastion. That’s not an opinion. Consensus among both gamers and critics was that Bastion was absolutely amazing. It won numerous awards for the narrative, music, art design and overall RPG and indie game awards.
Naturally, when Supergiant Games announces that it’s making another game, everyone is going to take notice. This week, Supergiant unveiled their next game, Transistor.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the gaming press soil themselves in excitement over an indie release but that’s exactly what happened in the run up to the release of Antichamber.
The game has been described as Escher-like, in reference to the famous Dutch “impossible reality” painter M.C. Escher. You might know his drawing “Relativity” which shows people climbing stairs with no regards for the laws of physics at all. And that seems to be where Alexander Bruce got his inspiration for Antichamber. Read the rest of this entry
The second-to-last week of January had a game I was very excited about. Strike Suit Zero was a gorgeous looking space sim. Having grown up on space sims, I was looking forward to a great space flight combat game. Then I actually started flying the titular Strike Suit ship and found myself quickly underwhelmed by twitchy controls and combat mechanics that didn’t work as advertised in the tutorial which resulted in a massive and frustrating difficulty spike.
Fortunately, there was a second big indie game release that week. Double Fine Productions released their much-anticipated The Cave. The developer is best known for their work on Psychonauts and they got a hand from popular games director Ron Gilbert whose resume includes the cult-hit Monkey Island series. Better than the team behind it was trailers promising puzzles, stories and dark humour. In other words, it ticked off most of the items on my checklist of things I like in games.
One of my favourite games of 2012 was Hotline Miami. There wasn’t much in the way of a deep plot or fantastic graphics. It was just an excuse to unleash some old school death and destruction on the forces of (relative) evil.
But what would happen if Hotline Miami crossed over to unleash chaos and death on other classic games? It might look a little like this.
I’m a huge fan of twin-stick shooters going back to the original twin-stick game for the home console, Ape Escape. When the PSN went down two years ago, one of my free game downloads was Dead Nation. I absolutely loved that game. It was an isometric camera version of Left 4 Dead. It wasn’t a zombie simulation as much as it was an arcade shoot-em-up.
When I picked up DNS Development’s Primal Fears, I was hoping for largely the same thing except with keyboard and mouse. The trailer showed that it was fairly arcade-inspired with enemies dying in massive explosions and/or bursting apart under a hail of gunfire. A trailer wouldn’t lie to us right? Read the rest of this entry
One of the surprise entries on many year-end lists was Super Hexagon. In a year where small indie games were more fondly thought of and better reviewed than many triple-A releases, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the one-man development team of Terry Cavanagh was able to produce a critically acclaimed game. However, I wasn’t sold on what appeared to be such a simple game so I had to pick it up and give it a go. Read the rest of this entry
Zombies. After the last year in gaming, I could understand if you’re a bit burned out on zombies. That doesn’t mean that the creativity in the zombie game genre is all used up. I have one more zombie game for you to consider. Dead Pixels is an 8-bit style throwback game which crosses the shoot ’em up style zombie game, like the Left 4 Dead games, with some more modern RPG-style mechanics. The result is a game that intentionally looks dated but plays fresh. The question is if this is one more zombie game you should add to your now vast zombie game collection. Read the rest of this entry
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