Consolation Prize

It seems to be traditional during the festive season to offer up some sort of list, whether it’s the “Best”, “Worst”, “Overhyped” or whatever adjective fits the agenda – well it’s my turn so I’m going to dish up my top 5 favourite games played this year.

There is, however, a small caveat – and that is to be considered for the list I must have at least played the game to completion this year. You will therefore notice that some high profile games like Fable 2 and Fallout 3 aren’t on the list, as even with the best will in the world there just aren’t enough hours in the day to play EVERY game that’s released in the mad rush towards Christmas. This isn’t a vapour-ware list of games I think should be worthy, but just a plain and honest list of games that I’ve enjoyed above and beyond my expectations this year.

5. Castle Crashers (Xbox 360 - Arcade)

There is something incredibly joyous about returning to the good old simplistic hack ‘n slash genre that is so representative of Castle Crashers. It’s as if the shackles have suddenly been thrown off and your inner child has suddenly been released and you’re free to play a game just for fun again - without worrying about “what it all means”. Castle Crashers wraps this shackle free gameplay up with some beautiful art design, adds a smattering of guttural humour and gives you a game that’s a joy to play time and time again.

Read what I thought of Castle Crashers here.

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Think of War World as the poor man’s Unreal Tournament - but with Mechs. That’s probably the easiest way to summarise the game and definitely my overriding impression from my brief time with the game. This therefore is predominantly an arena based deathmatch shooter with a selection of Mechs that have vaguely differing capabilities. Smaller Mechs tend to be quicker but have less armour, whereas the larger behemoths compromise speed in favour of a thick protective coat.

It’s quite difficult to formulate an in-depth opinion of War World due to the heavily restricted nature of the trial game. Given that you’re only able to choose from one mode (deathmatch), one arena, and one Mech (Panther Striker), and then given an embarrassingly miserly 50 seconds of game time before being told “Game Over” and unceremoniously dumped back at the title screen, its little wonder then that my overall impression isn’t going to be a glowing one. The cynic in me wonders if it is deliberately handicapped to avoid revealing all the game has to offer within 300 seconds, let alone 50 seconds.

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Since the “Summer of Arcade” extravaganza came to a close I’ve not really been paying that much attention to the latest Xbox Live Arcade releases. But it’s about time that changed, so I downloaded both Shadow Assault Tenchu and War World yesterday in the hope of finding a lost gem. Did I find a diamond in the rough? Or were they both just plain old lumps of coal? Well today I present my impressions of Shadow Assault Tenchu, to be followed shortly by War World.

Shadow Assault Tenchu is a puzzle action hybrid viewed from a top down perspective. Upon selecting a character - of which only the one: Rikimaru, is available in the trial game - the player is tasked with negotiating a series of levels and completing a simple objective per level such as “defeat all enemies” or “kill the Samurai general”.

However, instead of having equipped weapons at the ready with which to deal out death and destruction you are required to pick up “one shot items” that lie dotted around the map, laying them as traps in strategic positions to eliminate the opposition. Luckily choosing the best place for a trap is a fairly simple affair as the enemy path finding is purposefully rudimentary and it shouldn’t take too long before a set pattern can be identified. To make it even easier to sneak up on your foes the enemy line-of-sight is heavily restricted and is actually shown as a number of surrounding yellow squares giving you a clear indication of how close you can get without detection.

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You generally know within the first few minutes of playing a game whether or not you like it, or even if you’re willing to persevere with it for a little bit longer just in case you missed that hidden gem of game-play that suddenly adds cohesion to the entire experience – but I’m afraid no such epiphany happened while playing through the trial game of RocketBowl.

The idea behind RocketBowl is quite appealing; take the familiarity of bowling, place it all in an open area with multiple “lanes”, an undulating landscape replete with obstacles, and add in the ability to give your ball a boost or fire it off in either a left or right direction by igniting a rocket. It sounds quite interesting in theory, but in practice, I’m sorry to say, we’re left with a fairly dull game.

Given 10 frames on the course you have three attempts to knock down all the pins of each frame in sequence to accumulate the highest score. It’s not essential to aim at the set of pins directly ahead, and in-fact you are free to launch in any direction - which is actively encouraged given that there are lots of points bonuses and power-ups dotted around the course. The only real requirement is that you hit some pins somewhere if you want to keep those extra points and avoid the shot being called a “miss”. It doesn’t feel however, like you can do a great deal to control the rocket ball. You’re only able to nominally apply some swerve and fire off the occasional rocket, thus, it feels like you’re more of a spectator than an active participant.

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The summer season of Xbox Live Arcade which delivered exceptional high quality releases in Geometry Wars 2, Galaga Legions, Braid, and of course Castle Crashers has unfortunately come to an end and it seems like we’re once more back into the familiar “hit-and-miss” territory that’s so representative of the service.

Shred Nebula is a top down space shooter, similar in some respects to Asteroids, in which you control a single ship that rotates on a central axis, can fire and thrust in the direction you’re facing and whereby the ship’s inertia has a significant effect on movement and controls. However, unlike the simple joys of Asteroids this is a far more complex beast to handle.

Taking command of the prototype ship: the RIP Rocket, your task is to explore the nearby solar systems trying to locate the lost Algron Exploration Fleet which failed to return from an expansive exploratory charting mission 12 years hence. Along the way you will encounter both hazards and hostile aliens all of which are detrimental to the integrity of your ship.

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I’ve not had much of a chance to catch up on my backlog of games this week; I did however manage to dedicate some time to the glorious Castle Crashers developed by The Behemoth. Whereas I couldn’t quite get along with Alien Hominid HD, this title is an altogether different prospect and immediately appeals to my sadistic “beat-the-crap-out-of-everything-that-moves” nature.

To succinctly sum up the game, Castle Crashers is a side scrolling beat-em-up for up-to four players (locally or over Xbox Live) and instantly reminded me of one of my old arcade favourites Golden Axe.

Initially playing as one of four knights (Green, Orange, Blue, Red) the game starts as you’re partying hard in the castle hall only to be rudely interrupted when a fatally wounded guard is thrown through the door disrupting the party. Investigating the commotion you discover that the castle has been raided, the king threatened, some sort of magical gem stolen, and four princesses carried off by the contemptible invaders. So it’s up-to you to rescue the fair maidens and put those miscreants to the sword!

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Rebooting a franchise is not an easy task to undertake but the same development team that brought us the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition have managed yet again to apply the same skill and panache to an arcade classic reinvigorating Galaga with Galaga Legions.

Galaga (1981) is a top down shooter and sequel to Galaxian (1979), which in turn was born out of the success of Space Invaders (1978) and took the formula one step further and instead of the processional left-right pacing of the invaders introduced waves of alien ships that left the formation and dive bombed the player in desperate kamikaze like manoeuvres. Galaga Legions retains the feel of Galaga yet builds upon the core game-play successfully fusing it with some new game mechanics that hauls the franchise into 2008, and thus makes this a much more interesting prospect for the modern gamer than if was just a rehash of the old classic with enhanced graphics.

The game-play in itself retains the simple single screen “kill everything” nature of the original and basically requires the player to destroy wave-upon-wave of enemies in order to survive as long as possible and notch up the highest score. Each wave of aliens becomes progressively more complex but the game affords the player some foresight of enemy attacks as fading blue lines trace flight paths across the screen and entry points are momentarily highlighted with orange glowing squares.

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Braid is a stunningly beautiful game to behold. A fact evident from the moment it starts when you realise the first screen you see - a gorgeous backdrop with vibrant reds and oranges casting other objects into shadow - is actually not a menu screen at all but part of the game itself.

Best described as a a puzzle-platformer this adventure revolves around a character called Tim. Slowly the story unfolds via little snippets of text displayed as our hero passes past books placed upon pedestals at the beginning of each game world and it gives us the impression he’s looking for redemption. You see our hero is on a quest to make up for past misdemeanors as he tries to locate a princess with whom, as the story alludes to, he once shared a relationship but has now been snatched away by an evil monster.

The game starts out straightforward enough as the main character jumps and wanders around the levels collecting jigsaw pieces in order to complete a picture puzzle depicting an event that occurred at some point during Tim’s life. It soon becomes clear however that some lateral thinking needs to be employed to retrieve some of the missing pieces of the puzzle, which appear just out of reach, and this requires the player to start manipulating the creatures and the environment around them.

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