#review
#review
By Omar (@siegarettes)
Videoball seems so simple you’d think it had effortlessly popped into existence. You play as one of two teams of triangles, and you shoot out triangles in order to hit a ball into the other side’s goal. Despite that, Videoball has taken two years of refinement until it’s hit this final release, and prototypes of it have been around since 2013. And for those tuned to the minute aspects of design, the work put into it shows. It’s in the ripple of the stage as balls bound off its borders, the fighting game-esque hit pause that occurs on contact, the timing needed to get off each shot. That’s the kind of ludicrous tuning that you get after two years of filing down the edges.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
Within an hour of Auralux: Constellations I had already gotten into petty fights with the AI. They’d made a habit of taken the small planets that I’d decided were strategically relevant, and I continued to trade ownership of the planet, too stubborn to let it go. From there it got messier. I desperately fought off attacks from multiple sides, set up feints for territory, and let others fight only so I could swoop in for victory. Or at least, that’s the story that I wrote for it in my head.
By: Omar (@siegarettes)
Within the recent return of the dungeon crawler, Ray Gigant is working within frameworks that are at once traditional and forward facing. There’s the grid-based, first-person dungeon crawling that connects it Japan’s long love affair with Wizardy. At the same time it leads with an impression of a modern Phantasy Star IV, with fluidly animated characters and lavish, painted enemies populating its battles. Its pacing is thoroughly modern as well, seeking to take the archaeological exploration of the genre and transpose it to a portable format that can sneak into today’s hurried lifestyle.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
Stikbold is a game that gets by entirely by its charm. Between its bright color palette, humor, low poly characters and expressive animation, Stikbold is a game so lighthearted that often feels untethered from gravity. It’s a distinctly springtime game.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
Dariusburst CS always presented itself as a celebration. A final hurrah to a storied, bizarre series of arcade titles. So it seems appropriate that they’ve followed that up with a series of new playable ships based on other Taito arcade games. What I didn’t expect was the games that they’d choose to bring in.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
There’s a certain appeal to revisiting games. It can produce alternate interpretations of the original, reuse aspects of it in interesting ways, or simply reproduce an aesthetic that hasn’t been seen in a while. Code of Princess is, at the least, a clear attempt that follows the logic of those approaches. It has a clear goal of being a successor to 1996’s Saturn RPG-brawler hybrid, Guardian Heroes, to the point where it even brings that game’s director and programmer aboard for development. Even without that knowledge it would be clear; there’s a heavy aesthetic debt to Guardian Heroes here, everything from combat to menu layouts feels recognizable.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
The Umihara Kawase games have a strange history. The original Umihara Kawase was a small independent effort. The original game was developed by studio TNN, and published by a Japanese television station on the Super Famicom. The games themselves are stranger still, consisting of a set of puzzle platformers, where a Japanese school girl uses a bouncy fishing line as a grappling hook to navigate surreal configurations of platforms and fish creatures.
By: Ryan (@Henchman34) & RJ (@rga_02)
Coming from a guy that’s played a fair share of top-down horde based web games, Zombie Hunter Inc briefly alludes to the glorious days of flash games during middle school lunch. But Zombie Hunter Inc never really kindles the spark that so many great flash games before captured. The game is quite simply, archaic. It’s so basic in its most fundamental aspects, that it’s almost funny. I’ll admit there’s something truly unique about moonwalking across the stretched jpeg that qualifies as the floor of survival modes’ arena. But it can’t mask the fact that Zombie Hunter Inc will probably only appeal to fans of the cheesiest of games.