Viewing entries tagged
twin-stick
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.
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?!
Sometimes I wonder if a good game is actually not that good, but I have some irrational interest in one tiny element that makes it worth playing. Other times I wonder if I dislike a game that's actually brilliant, but there's one key part that ruins it completely. All of me knows that both of these things are true, so let's try not to think too hard about it.
As an artist, I love abstraction just about as much as the next guy. In fact, as a designer it's one of the most important tools in the box, as the essence of good design is arguably the ability to abstract concepts to their furthest point. Thankfully, this doesn't only apply to visual art, but I'm sure there are threads of abstraction found throughout video games as well.
This may be the only Halo game I ever play, which might seem a little strange to some, but obvious to others. To this day I've never played another Halo game, because I've never owned an Xbox of any kind. This could have been any other twin-stick shooter and I still would have given it a go, but it just so happens that it's a spin-off from one of the biggest Xbox franchises in history.
For the longest time "procedurally generated levels" was gaming blasphemy and an immediate turn off when used in a game's description. It felt like as soon as Minecraft hit it big, everyone and their mother was including procedurally generated elements in their game. The promise was millions of combinations and infinite replay-ability, which ultimately wound up meaning an endless gauntlet of bad content to slog through.
In the last decade we've seen a lot of indie darlings make a splash for being small little creative games that big studios wouldn't even bother thinking about. It's been an awesome period in gaming, as we've seen smaller games have a bit of a boom, which has introduced some truly unique experiences, and even defied traditional genre definitions. At the same time though, there's been a flood of games that piece together seemingly random elements to form another eye-rolling attempt at grabbing the hype for a few minutes of success.
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.
Rhythm games are another genre that I've never been all that good at, but love to play. Perhaps it's because I'm a big music fan, but it could just be because Audiosurf is one of the greatest games ever made. However, unlike Audiosurf, most rhythm games are stuck to a rigid progression tied to some average music. There's no better case of an entire genre living and dying by the quality of its soundtrack.
A long time ago, in a basement not so far away; a friend and I spent an entire afternoon trying to get Doom II running on their PC. They had a brand new 16-bit sound card to try out, and I had a copy of the full game backed up on about sixteen floppy discs. It was astronomical to conceive of such a huge game that used the cutting edge technology of the time. When we finally got it running, the 16-bit grunts of the Pinkies would forever be etched into my memory.
