Rubbish Barrage

Rubbish Barrage is somewhat crude: hand-drawn images by someone who is clearly not a Photoshop jockey, backgrounds and music ripped from somewhere or other, hacked together by one guy pretty quickly.

It's also kind of charming. It's a sidescrolling shmup, with enemies appearing at any or all screen edges and following pre-set (but not a priori predictable) movement patterns. You have to dodge, or destroy enough of the attackers that they don't intersect you. Three lives and you're out, though this just puts you back at the beginning of the current level (thankfully), not the game.

So far so typical; what's different about Rubbish Barrage is that rather than firing a single weapon type, perhaps upgrading over time with purchases or powerups, your craft pulls a random weapon out of its "magic bag" each time it uses one. And each has its own attack pattern. Thus, the bowling ball plummets downward (killing all enemies in its path), the shuriken hurls forward in an arc, the paper airplane has a somewhat erratic forward path, and so on. So you're not just dodging and firing, you're also seeing what damn thing you pulled out next, trying desperately to remember what it does and how you should be moving to take advantage of its capacities given how the enemies are moving, and, of course, dying frequently.

This is pretty humorous, actually.

Oh, the non-existent documentation doesn't make it clear -- but arrow keys for movement, and "z" to shoot. I haven't played with others, but the developer claims that up to eight can play (in split-screen mode, on a single PC), should you have that many gamepads (and, I suppose, enough USB ports to encompass them all).

In other words -- only one new idea here, really, but hey, that's more than most games can boast.

It's less frenetic than most shmups: more balletic in feel, a feeling reinforced by the music (Mozartian classical) and the grey-scaled landscapes that serve as backdrop. It won't revolutionize your concept of the ars ludorum, but it's kinda fun.