Galax-E-MailNice Little Shmup | Submitted by costik on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 00:00. |
Galax-E-Mail isn't as startlingly original as Bog Turtle's earlier game, Spuds, but it's a nice little shmup.
It's arena-ish, in that impenetrable barriers (which cause some damage if you bump into them) partition each level; you appear at a "black hole" at one point in the level, and must make your way to another black hole someplace else. Before you exit, however, you must destroy all the "alien bases" in the level -- which are spawn points for enemy ships.
Weapon of ChoiceWalk without rhythm, and you won't attract the... clam? | Submitted by luvcraft on Fri, 11/28/2008 - 17:54. |
On November 19th, Microsoft launched "the New XBox Experience", which included a lot of big changes to the XBox 360 dashboard, including "avatars" (think "Miis"), Netflix movie streaming, and the ability to dump games from disc to your hard drive, making them run faster (but still requiring the disc to launch the game).
A feature of the New XBox Experience that flew under the radar of most game websites, however, is "XBox Live Community Games" -- a subset of XBox Live Arcade games created exclusively by hobbyists and tiny companies, using a free programming framework provided by Microsoft.
It used to be that card games were about rank and suit. Even in non-traditional card games, like Rook or Milles Bornes ,the cards were simple and served only one function. This, naturally, constrained what it was possible to do in a card game.
Then came Magic: The Gathering. Magic pitched fundamental assumptions about how card games work out the window. Deal out hands from a deck? Not so fast: every player gets his own deck. His own deck with whatever cards he wants to put in it. And the cards! They were crammed with icons and text, because each card broke one of the game's many intricate rules in some way, and its graphic design had to explain how.
So in addition to loosing the plague of collectible game components on the world, Magic also smashed the constraints that limited what a card game could be. And that’s how we have Race for the Galaxy.
