Your Recommended Weekly Allowance of one-sentence looks at IG releases:
Beat Hazard
Short demo of a very flashy twin stick shooty, not sure how music affects the game, but has a good interface. 400 Points.
Drinkards
“Drinks” had best be “sips” or you’ll get alcohol poisoning playing a short game. 400 Points.
Equitunes
Sum logic action puzzle. 80 Points.
Freqµency
Ammo-management combat platformer. 240 Points.
GANBARE NATSUKI SAN
Grappling device platform maze collect-em-up. 80 Points.
Guns Loaded
Aurally painful mediocre shooter. 240 Points.
Link Attack
Puzzle DeFusion reworked or ripped-off? 240 Points.
Mr BeatLoop
Single bar step-sequencer with several simultaneous sets of sounds. 240 Points.
omg cats game@#$
OMG SpiderEvader beat you to the punch a month ago! 240 Points.
Pass The Pad!
More of a specific party game facilitation application. 80 Points.
Primary Attack
Color blending strategy game, reminiscent of Hexxagon. 80 Points.
SFG Soccer
Robotic arcadey footy. 400 Points.
They Came From the Ground
Another Slime Volleyball variant. 80 Points.
Tiger Storm
I used to think cheap hits in games were an artefact of the 90’s. 240 Points.
T-KARA
Slow-starting puzzler gets more interesting, feels like 2D Rubik’s Cube. 80 Points.
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SFG Soccer is a decent effort. It has some issues but it is definitely playable.
Guns Loaded is droll and very grey.
Link Attack and Puzzle Defusion are both clones of the Neo Geo Pocket’s Puzzle Link. So neither gets any marks for originality.
I actually liked Guns Loaded: it’s not great, but there is more gameplay there than in virtually any of the other horizontal shmups I’ve seen on XBIG to date.
Beat Hazard is kinda funky, but the visual effects have a nasty habit of hiding enemy ships and shots. It’s also got a problem when it comes to reading music off your network: what you get is “PC Album 1, PC Album 2, PC Album 3…” and a 10-15 second pause as you pull back information on each individual album in an effort to find the song you like…
Aha, I was unaware of Puzzle Link.
I didn’t get much of a pause with Beat Hazard reading from my PC, and the “PC Album 1″ would turn into the proper name upon selection. The order didn’t make any logical sense, though.
I did get a significant pause – but then I have over a thousand “albums” sitting on my machine upstairs – I long ago archived all my music (including singles) to MP3, together with stuff from places like emusic.com. The only question is whether this is an artefact of the uPNP protocol or Beat Hazard doing something daft like re-reading the entire album list on each request.
To answer the other point: the albums are sorted by name (A, B, C, etc) and while Beat Hazard does cache information, the cache will be wiped if your shared music is updated (e.g. adding a new album). I’m guessing this is because BH is doing a simple “PC Album 1 = ‘Elvis greatest hits’” mapping, which will be broken if albums are added or removed. Again, I don’t know if this is a uPNP limitation or some dodgy coding…
Well, regardless, it’s the best interface I’ve yet seen in an XBLIG that reads music from your PC HDD.
Mmm. I guess that’s true, though it’s not saying much