Worth a Look - July 2012

I never wanted to make this into a review site and the few reviews I have done have taken more time (and money) than I'd like, so instead I'm introducing a new, ad hoc feature, Worth a Look, where I take a handful of new arcade-inspired games and put them in the spot light.

This month I have a Space Invaders clone, a Breakout/Arkanoid clone and a modern fighting game that inspired this feature in the first place.

Skull Girls 

Developer:	Revenge Labs
Publisher:	Autumn Games/Konami
Platforms:	XBLA/PSN(PS3)
Price:	1200MSP/£10.99
Demo available:	Yes

What is it?

If you like Guilty Gear or Blaz Blue, check out Revenge Labs's debut, Skull Girls, which actually hit Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network for PS3 a couple of months ago. There may only be eight combatants, but Revenge Labs have done a great done of making sure they are as different from one another as possible. There's also a pretty solid tutorial mode, which Revenge hopes will teach people who are new to fighters how things like combos, launchers, cancels and juggles work.

Titan Attacks

Developer:	Puppy Games
Publisher:	Steam/independent
Platforms:	PC
Price:	£2.99
Demo available:	Yes/No

What is it?

Almost as soon as it was released in 1978 people started copying Space Invaders' formula. Most of the time developers do nothing to distinguish themselves from the pack, but Puppy Games manage to be both be highly retro and brilliantly redesigned at the same time. As well as the usual wave-based, single-screen action you'd expect from a Space Invaders clone, Titan Attacks includes an upgrade shop, which appears at the end of every level. If you simply want to survive you can top up your shield after each wave, but if you want to power up your tank, you need to save your coppers for several levels. Whether it's worth the wait is entirely up to you.

WoOOPup 

Developer:	Bedroom Studio Entertainment
Publisher:	Independent
Platforms:	XBox Live Indie Games
Price:	80MSP
Demo available:	Yes

What is it?

Breakout clones are even more commonplace than Space Invaders clones, but good ones are rare. WoOOPup! by Bedroom Studios is easily the best on Microsoft's Xbox Live Indie Games service. While not as distinctive as Shatter, WoOOPup has very high production values and a few new ideas of its own, including coins that appear when you break a block and can only be collected by the ball, stackable power ups and coin collecting bonus rounds.

That does it for this month. Check the Worth a Look tag in the coming months for more tasty, arcade-inspired treats.

MTW

Boss Fight - Gigantic Warship (R-Type, 1987)

Last month's boss was an antagonist who turns up time and time again, at the end of every level (albeit in different guises). This month's boss is an entire level! It can only be R-Type's level 3 boss, the Gigantic Warship.

Usually bosses have a couple of weak stops that you have to exploit in order to destroy them, but this monstrosity needs to be taken apart piece by piece -- not just to defeat it, but in order to survive. You approach the warship from the back, which means your first challenge is to avoid the main thruster engine, which blasts out hot death every few seconds, but that's not its only rear armament, there are also twin cannons and multiple turrets. The game then forces you underneath the warship, where there's more turrets and a bank of four lower thrusters, each of which have to be destroy individually and a few trash enemies to boot. Once you're past this you come up and around the front of the ship, only you cannot turn around, so you have to make careful use of your Force (R-Type's detachable weaponised pod) for both your protection and the turrets' destruction. This means you have to make sure you either have to start the level with a Force and not die or make sure you collect the yellow and/or red power-ups that appear while you're facing the warship, otherwise you have almost no chance of getting past this section. Once you've come around the front you've got to get past more turrets to blast the distinctly phallic purple engine unit on top. As a kid I never realised just how much this thing looks like a penis, but look at it! It's a long shaft, with pulsating pipes running up its length and a bulbous purple end, which has a sheath that exposes its most vulnerable area. It also moves in and out, spits out gobs of stuff. A pixel cock if ever I saw one and also the key destroying the whole ship. The best tactic is to get your Force wedged next to the engine and let it do the work, otherwise you have to have nerves or steel and surgeon-like control in order to sneak in and blast it with the R-9's wave cannon. Good luck with that.

To end, here's YouTube user Matrixandraia taking the Gigantic Warship apart on the sublime R-Type remake, R-Type Dimensions. I must admit, this guy makes short work of it, but that's down to practice:

MTW

Classic of the Month - VirtuaStriker

Manufacturer:	Sega
Genre:	Sports
Board:	Model 2
Year:	1994

Tonight is the final of the UEFA Euro 2012 football championships. After a month of tense competition, only Spain and Italy are left. There's been highs, there's been lows (not least England going out to Italy on penalties), but in the end it's come down to these two. As such when it came to choosing a new Classic of the Month I thought it only appropriate to do a football game and the first one that sprang to mind was Sega's Virtua Striker.

In the mid-90s 3D, polygonal graphics suddenly exploded in the arcade, with Sega releasing the lion's share of 3D games. They gave this series of games a name: Virtua. There was Virtua Cop, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Virtual-On and of course Virtua Striker. Powered by the Sega Model 2, the Virtua games looked incredible when they were first released and in the case of Virtua Fighter and Virtua Striker, they were the first of their kind (Virtua Tennis did not come along until the Naomi boards were released in '98). 

The animation was smooth and authentic and the sense of being on the pitch and in the action was greater than any other football game at that time. You only played a two minute match (with no half time and without swapping ends), but the matches were perfectly paced for an arcade game. Like any other arcade game progress required success; there were no long-running leagues or cups here, if you lost your match, your game was over. This gave each match a sense or desperate urgency to score that later football games on home consoles never really had. Played with a friend, that sense of urgency and the need to triumph was even greater. 

Virtua Striker may have been surpassed in later years by Konami's Pro Evolutional Soccer series and EA's FIFA series, but at the time it gave arcade gamers a football experience unlike any other. 

Right, I'm off, the kick off is in 10 mins and I need to get a drink.

MTW