Viewing entries tagged
neon
Sometimes a game comes along that you've never heard about, but thanks to its strong aesthetic and firm genre, you wonder how you could ever have let it pass you by. I love experiencing creations without any expectations or preconceptions, and when they turn out to be the kind of creation you've spent a long time looking for, the satisfaction could not be more palpable.
In recent times, Bithell Games have been making a name for themselves as an indie developer to watch. Of course Mike Bithell is someone that's been on my radar since I first played the brilliant Thomas Was Alone, and I suspect I'm not the only one. However, what's really excited me about his company's recent work, is that they've released a series of "Bithell Shorts". These are short, but high quality games, that explore a unique mechanic or system and tell a succinct story. Needless to say, this is a winning combination for me, as I often prefer to play smaller games with nothing but quality content, as opposed to bloated hundred hour grinds that never truly satisfy.
Oh how I love a good twin-stick shooter. The simplicity of the mechanics, the awe of the aesthetics, and the challenge of the moment-to-moment gameplay. All of these things make up one of the purest and most satisfying gaming experiences you can get, so why do people keep insisting on adding lore into the mix?!
To this day, no music driven game has managed to get its generation formula as precise as Audiosurf. I love the idea of using my own music library to automatically generate levels to play in a game, but it turns out that coding for procedural creation is really difficult.
How much game is enough game for a game to be game? This might be a valid question rattling around in your head after playing OutDrive, but I'm trying to be too cynical about something that's essentially a fun little game. I just can't figure out if I prefer the product, or the potential.
There's a short list somewhere of super hype crazes that I completely missed out growing up. I never knew what a Pokémon was until recently, I've never played a Metal Gear game, and I've never played either a Metroid, or Castlevania game. It's funny how even though I've been playing games since the 80s, there are some major mainstream holes in my experience.
Before we had DLC and digitally distributed patches, there was a wonderful thing called an "expansion pack". These were like dreams come true after you'd sunk countless hours into that game you'd saved up for and gingerly cracked the box to get inside. Loading up an expansion felt like finding a treasure trove of extra gameplay that had somehow always been there, just hidden away and waiting for permission to exist and entertain.
In the last few years I've been increasingly turned on to the whole re-imagined 1980s style that's brought on some interesting interpretations of alt-retro-isms. I don't know if it's been around the whole time, but all the amazing synthwave music and neon-fueled art has become some of my favourite retro-media these days.
Remember the first time you installed Half-Life 2 and were forced to use that silly DRM launcher program called Steam? It was obtrusive and clunky; to the point that I found a hacked version of the game that didn't require it so that I was able to play Half-Life 2 without it crashing every time my internet connection dropped.
