another shooting spree

Playing both Metal Slug Advance and CT Special Forces in the past couple of weeks awoke in me a renewed desire for the simplistic arcade shooters of old. It's been a year since I last checked out Kraisoft's offerings, and it seems they have been busy crafting an entirely new shooter to join their collection: After the End. The game is an isometric clickfest that pits you, a lone human soldier, against hordes of evil mutants as you blast your way through 73 levels and a variety of locations on the planet Rydon 7. Though they seem to have a strange obsession with the word "hot" when describing the game's many attributes.

Anyone familiar with Reflexive's Crimsonland will have seen this approach before: your character is dropped into an arena and you must destroy a certain amount of monsters before proceeding. And while After the End allows you to switch between weapons, the power-ups and basic gameplay elements are almost identical. Though After the End feels more open, as the later levels in the demo have more objective-based missions where you must fight your way to a point on the map. In both cases, it feels like the develoeprs tried to merge a space shooter with a ground based battle. Crimsonland's graphics are more polished, and definitely has the better soundtrack, but they're equally fun if you don't mind seeing your character rotate 360 degrees about his waist.

And then there's Alien Shooter. Such a simple, unassuming name. Why are you brought to a mysterious facility full of corridors and power switches and barrels of green goo? To shoot aliens, of course. In the same vein as Crimsonland and After the End, the game is an isometric shooter with a simple objective: destroy everything on screen while completing various mission objectives, and collect money that can be spent on better weapons, skill upgrades or extra lives at the end of each level. It feels a lot more complete, and has more in common with games like Quake and Doom than Crimsonland or After the End. The sad part is that the demo only lets you play for six minutes at a time. It's like they give you the needle, but only let you stick it part way in before snatching it from your eager hands. So what was I supposed to do? Buy the full version, of course. And I'd be lying if I didn't fire it up at least once a day, if only to see myself be swarmed by endless waves of monsters, my chaingun slowly running out of ammo.

Clearly English is not Sigma Team's native tongue, but I won't hold it against them. In games like these it's really hard to accept the story for why you're unloading buckets of lead into alien creatures, let alone how you got your hands on the weapons in the first place. For an arcade-style game, Alien Shooter is great - though the 10 missions in the campaign go by pretty quickly once you get accustomed to the basic "hit and run" strategy. Survival mode will keep this game on my computer for a long while indeed; much like some will load up Bejeweled or Alchemy to kill some time, I'll be trying to survive the endless waves of aliens.

After playing Alien Shooter for hours on end, it's hard not to notice how much actual detail went into the creation of the game's engine. The majority of the items in the game are movable or destructable, certain walls can be blown up to reveal secret areas and the explosive weapons have area/splash damage. If there was one thing I would change for an added touch of excitement, it would be the load times on the weapons. Both Crimsonland and After the End have magazine-style weapons, and once you run out of ammo there is a short delay while it reloads. This adds a lot of tension when you're being attacked from all sides. As long as you have a lot of ammo in Alien Shooter, you could basically stand in one part of the screen and completely unload on anything that approaches. Anyone who's interested in more Alien Shooter action after the first game can check out Sigma Team's two expansions, a bit ridiculously priced for what they're offerening (only 5 more levels each) and considering the cost of the original game.

Back to the realm of traditional shmups, Wings of Megaira is an entry in the 2005 Independent Games Festival student showcase. I read about it on this blog, a collection of Shockwave and Flash games that I could easily dedicate another post to (the port of the original Prince of Persia comes to mind). You'll need Direct X 9.0c to enjoy Megaira's commendable 3D graphics, and I'm not sure if it's just my computer, but there was no sound in the game. It would have added a much needed dimension to the experience, because visual feedback alone in such a fast paced game almost becomes irrelevant. Megaira uses two features to make this game interesting: you can absorb enemy weapons to use them on your own ship, as well as create a "Time Shift" that stops time and allows you to dodge tougher spread-fire attacks. You get a meter on the side of the screen similar to the Sands of Time that fills up when you kill enemies. As a complete game experience it still needs some refinement, but it was nice to see what the next generation of game developers are up to.

A fucking rock concert of an experience, Jets 'n Guns is another shoot 'em up that lives by its name. I wish all developers were this straightforward. Instead designers love to obfuscate the game's intentions by giving it a title like "Project: Snowblind" or "Splinter Cell". Why not just "Generic futuristic first person shooter" or "Stealthy espionage action-adventure that is suprisingly realistic for a multiplatform release"? Never mind. The game has style, too: the cartoonish, Crimson Skies-inspired aircraft and exaggerated environments are mixed with an incredibly catchy soundtrack by video game metalheads Machinae Supremacy. Like Alien Shooter, the whole point of the game is to complete missions while making money to upgrade your equipment; in this case, the parts on your jet. A great addition is the temperature monitoring of your weapons - the longer they are in use the hotter they get, eventually making them unusable. This deters players like myself that just lay on the fire button flying their ship all around the screen. Based on some recent reading, this game might even be available in arcades thanks to the FlexArcade PC-based cabinets.

There's something to be said about this simplistic approach to game design, because the end result is just as fun to play as the latest FPS or 3D platformer sporting a licensed engine. If you can look past the low-tech visuals, you'll find they share more in common with their big-budget counterparts than initially apparent. In fact, all this makes me think about what Andrew Phelps said about the game industry needing B-sides. Why not include these experimental, simplistic games as a side order to the main course? I mean Valve did this by releasing nuclear vision's Codename: Gordon over Steam. I think it would be entertaining to see developers have a little fun with their properties and create mini-games based on the main game. Better yet, give an independent developer a chance to show off by including their game as part of a larger package - this will increase their visibility or perhaps create a cult favorite, while adding value to the purchaser. There are way too many underground developers out there trying to save dying genres (adventure games are a classic example) while big publishers keep pushing out sequels or rehashes of proven formulas. For the industry to survive in the long term this symbiotic approach is almost necessary.

one finger parallel to the sky