Captain Forever/Successor

Farbs, developer of the must-play ROM Check Fail, brought this game to IGF China and took no prisoners. It was an award well-earned, as this is pure awesomeness distilled into a Flash shmup. ROM Check Fail remixed 8-bit classics in a novel way, and his latest outing also splices in other influences. Captain Forever takes the shmup core and melds it with RPG progression and modular Lego construction. The end result is an interesting beast of a game that places emphasis on player-generated content. Even if you don't dig Asteroids or R-Type you should definitely give this a go.

The graphics are basic but have a nice glow effect to them; the pattering of ship fire seems almost melodic. You start out small but are soon given a handful of ship parts, boosters, and guns that you graft on in real-time with the mouse. Ship construction could be likened to tinkering with Legos; you're limited only by your imagination and can build a ridiculous assortments of ships. After your initial building phase waves of enemies appear at random. Once you destroy them you can salvage any unscathed equipment and attach it to your vessel. The game has an open-ended structure, so you continue fighting and rebuilding until you die or create an unstoppable juggernaut. Until you construct something that would put the Millennium Falcon to shame you'll always have something to add, so you have the RPG dopamine-drip of constantly upgrading yourself. Since this is all real-time the benefits are immediate; I'd rather take a kickass gun over a +1 to my Dexterity any day.

What also makes this cool is that it's a lot more methodical than your standard shooter fare. Combat is slower-paced than your typical shooter, but this is a godsend given how much you have to factor into each fight. You have to assess your opponent's weaknesses and take advantage of them, and also have to be careful of what you destroy. You can shoot off an enemy's boosters to make them immobile or disintegrate their weapons to render them impotent, but whatever you demolish won't be available for your own benefit. Likewise, whenever you sustain damage you have to rebuild mid-firefight to stay afloat (aspace?). Being forced to rebuild under all this pressure adds a good deal of tension to the experience. Overall, this seems like the best implementation of user-created content (sans mods, of course) to date. Fuck Spore and Little Big Planet.

If Captain Forever is the Lego set you threw the tantrum for at Wal-Mart, Successor is the gargantuan set you begged for come Christmas time. A better analogy for us computer geeks would be that Successor is to Left 4 Dead 2 as Forever is to L4D1. Every aspect of ship design is further expanded, and possible strategies (for you and enemy combatants) increase exponentially. Battering rams, bubble shields, and variations on all the core pieces add tons of depth to ship construction and playstyles. If you enjoy the first title you should by all means pay the $20 for the sequel. I know it's cliche to say that I had to tear myself away from the game to write the review, but dammit it's true. I spent four nonstop hours with CS and I fully intend to jump back in as soon as I'm done typing. What's even cooler is that when you purchase Successor you buy into all of the further sequels, the first of which is already in development. Here's to hoping for multiplayer somewhere down the line. Now get moving, you have a ship to build.