What's new and entirely ephemeral...
WiiWare -- Three games this week. See the XBLA section below for information on Voodoo Dice and Ben 10 Alien Force: The Rise of Hex. Robocalypse: Beaver Defense is a tower defense game with a T-rated sense of cartoon humor.
Wii Virtual Console -- An unusual title this week, Natsume's Wild Guns, a two-player SNES target-shooting game with a Wild West theme.
DSiWare -- Four games this week. X-Scape is a 3-D spacefaring navigation/RPG game with an epic story. Hero of Sparta is a mythology-inspired action game with puzzle-solving elements. A Topsy Turvy Life: The Turvys Strike Back™ is another turn-the-DSi-upside-down game using the stylus to control arcade-style shoot-'em-up action. And Telegraph Sudoku & Kakuro brings another 500 Sudoku puzzles and a sampling of the more difficult extension, Kakuro, to the DSi.
XBox Live Arcade -- Three games last week. Doom II brings ID's classic shooter sequel to XBLA, with original graphics and audio intact (albeit in 5.1 Surround now), and 9 brand-new levels in a package called "No Rest for the Living." I'm a big fan of the series and haven't actually played II to death, so I had to pick this one up. Voodoo Dice is an action/puzzle game with a generally 2-D design occasionally complicated by 3-D considerations. And Ben 10 The Rise of Hex is a platformer based on the popular Cartoon Network series, taking advantage of the character's transformational abilities.
Game Room -- Nothing new to play last week. Might as well hang out and speculate quietly amongst ourselves about whether that scruffy guy hanging around by the change machine is an employee, a drug dealer, or just plain creepy. UPDATE: Game Pack 004 actually went live 05/19 and I missed it -- it contained multiple games, some of which did not become available until 05/26. So we are getting onto more of a weekly schedule, with biweekly packs unlocking over time. To catch up, Game Pack 004 contains 14 games: Konami's arcade games Time Pilot and Strategy-X; Atari's coin-ops Asteroids, Millipede and Space Duel, Intellivision games Boxing, Buzz Bombers, and Shark! Shark!, Activision's Stampede, Spider Fighter, River Raid and Grand Prix for the Atari 2600, and Atari's 2600 titles Haunted House and Demons to Diamonds (which was paddle-controller based, so beware the XBox's analog stick.)
PS3 on PSN -- Two games debuted last week on Sony's console. Super Stacker brings the popular Flash puzzle game to PS3, with all of its blocky personality intact and new multiplayer and online modes. Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype continues the horizontally-scrolling shooter series as a sequel to the original downloadable game that arrived on the PS3 in December 2008.
Monday, May 31, 2010
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-River Raid is very good in this pack.
ReplyDelete-Asteroids is not even close to the original. Too many problems to mention (sound, pacing, enemy AI etc.)
Man, that's a disappointment. Atari's released Asteroids in so many reasonably well-emulated forms in the past -- what could have gone wrong? Sounds like more than DIP switch defaults.
ReplyDeleteWas Space Duel a vector-scan game with a one-eyed alien that talked to you?
ReplyDeleteI'm still hoping for some of the more obscure Intellivision games to show up in Game Room. Microsurgeon, Truckin', etc.
I think you're thinking of Sega's Space Fury. Space Duel was Atari's Asteroids sequel, of sorts, with an odd hitched-ship flying dynamic and color vector graphics.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think Activision acquired the Imagic library when they went under, but I've only seen Imagic's Atari 2600 games re-released as Activision games. So they might be owned by Activision, or they might be in limbo these days.
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