Llamasoft has just released Gridrunner Revolution, an update to Gridrunner (1982) and Gridrunner++ (2002). The game has all the hallmarks of a modern Jeff Minter production: psychedelic graphics and gobs of hidden rules and scoring mechanics. And sheep.
Each level has a terrible sun in it that periodically fires on your ship, but can be destroyed for an extra man and leaves behind a black hole that creates a gravity well for your bullets. Curving your bullets through gravity is an important mechanic, allowing you to raise your multiplier and hit enemies from different angles (you can rotate your ship with the right mouse button). The extra ships system is novel – each ship looks unique and has a slightly different way of firing. When you find the right ship and the right angle it looks impressive and nets you an even more impressive multiplier.
I also really like the “Sheepie Save” mechanic. Collecting sheep increases your ships’ power but can also be used to save a dying ship. Once hit, your ship falls toward the bottom of the screen, but if you guide it to a sheep, it will be saved. Keeping your ship bouncing until a sheep arrives is actually one of my favorite things to do in the game. I won’t spoil how it works, exactly, but it’s a nifty idea.
Gridrunner Revolution is definitely a lot easier to get into than Minter’s Space Giraffe, although I feel like the game doesn’t really start cooking until well into the Madras (Medium) difficulty or in Vindaloo (Hard). From my experience, that’s the point where the mechanics start to make sense, because you’ll really be relying on your understanding of them to survive. For that reason I’d personally prefer fewer levels with a faster difficulty ramp. It might also make each level feel a bit more unique (as it is, you’re playing level after level of psychedelic void – pretty, but they tend to blur into one another).
You can have the full game for $20, or with Space Giraffe at $25. The full game comes with the original Gridrunner as a bonus feature that you can unlock.
“Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the player’s computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the player’s ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.”
Created by Zach Gage. Nope, I haven’t tried it! (By the way, this is not one of the “great playable games” I mentioned in the last post.)
We originally posted the preview of this a month ago, but Hideous and Andy Wolff’s Let’s Jump is finally ready for consumption using the eyes and ears on your head and the fingers on your hands.
You control a sky diver by firing in the opposite direction to the one you want to travel in, pushing yourself with the blasts. Score as much as you can before your altitude hits 0m and above all just enjoy the sights and sounds of this sweet sojourn in the sky!
Captain Forever is the latest project of Farbs (ROM CHECK FAIL), and his first commercial project since he quit his job and became a full-time indie developer. In the game you pilot the Nemesis, a spaceship which can be modified with scrap parts taken from enemy ships. Despite the relatively few types of ship parts in this version and the limited scope of the game’s world, I found Captain Forever to be quite enjoyable – the pacing feels brisk and there’s always another ship design to try (or admire) on the horizon. This makes deciding whether to fight or flee and how to do it a blast.
Although there’s no demo for the pre-launch, Farbs himself gives a few good reasons for why you should or shouldn’t buy it now ($15 for pre-launch, discounted from $20). Personally, I’m glad I got it early, because 1. the game is already great fun, 2. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s coming in the supporter-only updates and 3. it’s easy to want to support Farbs, creative and lovable bastard that he is. You might also check out the TIGSource thread for more opinions about the game.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:52:00 GMT
GearToyGear is a new crazy-fast tunnel shooter from shmup deity Kenta Cho. The instructions are: “Avoid incoming bullets/lasers/obstacles and destroy enemies. Hold the right trigger to speed up and earn more score.” It might be prudent to add a seizure warning as well.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently posted about an interesting little flash game entitled Upgrade Complete. It’s a simple shmup where the aim is to blast everything onscreen to hell, collect money to upgrade and keep on killing. The difference here is that you use the money to upgrade everything, and I mean everything. The main menu only has two buttons until you buy more. Like how it appears in the screenshot? That’s the final upgrade of the graphics engine. You even have to buy the music and the mute button seperately.
It’s a bizarre game that’s ultimately varied in the satisfaction the player feels from it, which I can only really equate to playing ‘Ginormo Sword’. Simply put, the game itself is pretty boring as the enemies don’t fight back at all, and the only real measure of entertainment comes from just how much you enjoy a persistent upgradable experience. There is something so curiously brilliant about the way everything slowly builds together around your gameplay. Customising your ship with lightning cannons and missle launchers as well as upgrading each one to launch volleys of firepower in seconds is quite a lot of fun even though there is no real grand goal and each level features no great challenge to overcome. It is a game that completely depends on your own involvement to turn it into something above your initial perceptions.
Something worth playing if only to discuss why the hell it’s worth playing then…
Nanosmiles has been long overdue for a review on TIGSource, especially since Dong was considerate enough to have it translated by Siiseli from Japanese into English for us. The game pits the player against microbes in an arena shmup with a twist: the unarmed player must collect and guide attack units in order to clear each level of enemies. This gives Nanosmiles a blend of direct and indirect control, and it helped to generate enough innovation within the game for it to have been showcased in last year’s Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show. (In case you didn’t know, the deadline for SOWN 2009 is August 16, and there is no entry fee.)
Overall, Nanosmiles is a well rounded game with enough levels to explore the basics of its gameplay and a challenging final level to cap the experience. The darting nature of the directional controls can be annoying at times, but it’s also fitting.
Edit: Dong recently updated EngRish Games with a post about Exelinya Burst, which is a cartoony Every Extend variant with a grappling claw that is now in English.
DUX, a new homebrew Dreamcast R-Type-based horizontal shoot ‘em up, is drawing the ire of hardcore shmup players on the Shmups.com forum, in a back-and-forth with the developer that I rubbernecked last night. The main problem, I gather, is that not only were many promised features left out of the final release (like multiple game modes and loops), but the game’s scoring system and continue system are also broken due to a few simple oversights and bad decisions. The creator, one of the members of NG:DEV.TEAM (Last Hope), tries to play down the bugs rather than accept them straightforwardly, drawing further criticism (okay, intense hatred), but also admirably offers up a free patch to people who purchased the game.
Why does this interest me? Well, there is, as Bill of the2bears puts it (source), the obvious “train wreck” factor of watching a developer go head-to-head with the most intense type of video game fans. It’s also not every day that a full-blown Dreamcast production comes out. But what I really found fascinating about all of this was 1. the relationship between the developer and the fans, and 2. the ideas and history behind the shoot ‘em up genre that make its fans enjoy it so intensely in a way that most players don’t understand.
To summarize the points of conflict, scoring is of the utmost importance for a hardcore shoot ‘em up player, and in DUX there is currently a bug which allows the player to “counter-stop,” or max out his or her score, in the first level. Also, by committing suicide, one can abuse the game’s checkpoints and extends to max out their lives and score. The final shmup sin that DUX’s creator committed is forcing the player to continue, which makes it difficult for players who consider continuing to be cheating and are aiming to “1cc” or one-credit the game.
For many people, the whole thing no doubt sounds like a bunch of loser assholes whining about technicalities that 99% of the population wouldn’t give two shits about, and indeed, perhaps given some of the ravings and crude insults hurled at the developer (e.g. “Don’t ever make games again”), there is some truth to that remark. But I think there’s also something fascinating about hardcore shoot ‘em up players, the purity of the genre, and how the improvements made with each generation of games seem incremental and yet appear to make a world of difference to the players who play them. It also brings in to question more generally why people play different types of games – is it for entertainment, challenge, art, completion, or what? For shoot ‘em up players it’s obviously about the challenge as well as the eye and ear-candy.
And finally, yes, the relationship of the developer to the player, of which, like any relationship, the creator is at the ultimate mercy of the consumer, who generally has no interest in the hardship of creation or the feeling of having a work analyzed and criticized. On one hand, this is the way it is and will probably always be, and perhaps this kind of artistic Darwinism is necessary to further the growth of games and art, and the creators, too… on the other hand, I think one of the great things about independent game development is that it blurs the line between creator and player in a way that I believe moves the medium forward (and backward, and side-to-side) in a more positive and proactive way.
As for DUX, the game certainly looks pretty, and if the scoring bug and continues don’t bother you, and you have a Dreamcast, it’s probably worth the $20 for you. Future versions of the game will also hopefully have this bug cleared up.
Game creators Chris Crawford and Jason Rohrer will be the main focus of the new episode of “Into the Night”, a joint French/German documentary series. The five minute preview above has been released to give you a taste of the full hour-long documentary that will be aired on ‘ZDF’ and ‘ARTE’, both available free on Astra on July 2nd. Not to fear everyone else outside of europe, as according to Play This Thing! who previously posted a flattering preview also announce that there’ll be an online version streamed much like the preview. Hope you’ll all catch it then when it’s released!
Bonus News: Pre-orders for Perfect Suguri on Rockin’ Android have begun, with a special sale price of $16.99 instead of the regular $19.99, which also includes free U.S shipping. They’ve got my money at least, but then again they probably already did…
(Thanks to Jsticker in tigIRC for the Arte.TV news!)
