Twice the awesome for a retail title at 1/60th the price.
An excellent twin-stick shooter came out a few years back, a little before you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting five games that wish they were half as great as Geometry Wars. Bullet Candy was a ton of fun, filled with lovely explosions and perfectly tuned fast-paced shooting. Now, in anticipation of Bullet Candy 2 coming out soon-ish, the original has received an update with the new graphics engine, and is available at a bargain price, too.
The $1 price tag is actually a bit misleading, because that’s just the minimum you can pay. The price is actually what you feel the game is worth, with $1 being the minimum. I own the original and wouldn’t mind giving it a replay with a graphic tune-up, so I paid $5. It’s only fair.
With bonus Space Giraffe offer, too!
It’s been a long time in development but Gridrunner Revolution has finally been made available for download. The high-speed, pleasantly mad shooter has a legacy spanning 27 years and counting, and time has treated its evolution very well. The graphics are much nicer, and the gameplay better developed, but the classic arcade action is as intense as it’s ever been.
The basic premise is pretty simple- move with the mouse, the ship auto-fires, and when sheep power-ups are collected the ship adds more guns. There are gravity wells around the single-screen playfield, and creating loops of bullets around them increases the score for everything. The Revolution of the title comes from being able to rotate the ship a full 360 degrees, meaning not only can the entire screen be covered in firepower but you can more precisely position yourself for prettier bullet arcs, which directly increase the scoring potential. Playing for the sake of blasting everything in sight is fun, and making complex bullet patterns is pretty. It’s eye-candy mayhem at its finest.
Sweetening the deal is an early-bird buyer promotion. Gridrunner Revolution is $20 by itself, or $25 with the excellent Space Giraffe. Either way it’s an excellent application of the gaming budget.
I don’t normally write “coming soon” posts, but I meant to give Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection some post-E3 coverage and then summer kicked in, all but erasing any time or interest I had for writing. So, having had a sudden reminder of the game’s pending existence, it only seems fair to fix that oversight.
When all the bits are working properly, pinball is a fantastic game. It can be tough to find a machine with all the bumpers responding and the flippers set to give a properly strong snap, but when the mechanics work there’s nothing like it. The physical feel of the table under your hands, the slight vibration of the machine as the ball rolls over the table, the lights, sounds, and feedback or the table, all combine in a way that gives a completely different sensation from the standard video game.
Nice as that is, pinball tables take up lots of space and maintenance isn’t easy. Owning a nice collection is right out for most people, so we need to make due with the next best thing- video game recreations. Crave made Wii and PS2 pinball fans happy back in early 2008 with the well-received Williams Collection, but those looking for a full HD experience were left wanting. That’s going to be fixed on September 8th, when the PS3 and 360 versions finally arrive. While Gamestop doesn’t seem to care that it exists (and they’ve been dropping the ball on smaller titles more often lately) it should be readily available elsewhere.
-edit- And after that crack at Gamespot’s expense it’s now listed on their site. I hereby temporarily revoke my snark.
The reason this matters is that the Wii and PS2 versions were excellent pinball, and the 360/PS3 isn’t so much a port as it is an upgrade. The bump in graphics is nice, of course, but online leaderboards and the addition of three new tables make this fantastic collection worth a second look even for those who played the original. The collection of tables from the 70s thorugh the 90s is top-notch, and the physics are as close to perfect as anyone has managed yet. Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection archives some of the best pinball ever made, and should be well worth tracking down when it hits in a couple of weeks.
By now it should be a given you’ll be buying Scribblenauts when it comes out mid-September. If Scribblenauts doesn’t nab a Game of the Year award or two then something has gone horribly wrong somewhere, and its sheer charm and creativity make it a must-have. Still, Warner Bros. and 5th Cell seem worried that Maxwell, the main character, is too intimidatingly awesome, and have taken steps to make sure that the player is properly prepared to control him. Simply put, if you reserve the game you get a rooster hat.
This giant red hat comes exactly as you see in the game, with three red blobs sticking out the front and white ear coverings that, sadly, aren’t actual headphones. Despite its technological limitations there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do with headwear like this, making it one of the most useful pieces of swag ever. It’s only available at GameStop and EB Games in the US and Canada, but seeing as there’s one on every street corner that shouldn’t be too much of an impediment.
Waaaay back in January it was announced that Gridrunner +++ would release in April on PC. Seeing as August is right around the corner it’s pretty obvious that was wishful thinking, but the time has been used to rip out Gridrunner+++’s soul and insert a shiny new one in its place. Adapting the controls from the 360’s gamepad to a mouse started off as a small tweak and turned into a complete rebuild of the game from the ground up.
Now that the controls have been modified and all levels completely re-balanced to work better to work better with them, the new Gridrunner is just about done. It’s received its final name, Gridrunner Revolution, and is in the last round of testing before release. In preparation for the joyous day, Jeff Minter has written an excellent history of the series at his blog, and the gameplay video of the first few levels (taken prior to the name change) played on easy is available below. It’s gonna be beautiful.
As for the fate of the 360 version, that’s still a mystery. The game was submitted to Microsoft last summer and disappeared into a corporate limbo. Until someone at MS gives the go-ahead, there’s nothing else that can be done. Still, the PC version is coming along nicely and Llamasoft has been very careful to make sure it runs on even low-spec machines. An XBLA version would be nice, but at this point it seems unlikely.
Sat 3 Oct 2009 - 1:00 am
