Update: Star Guard is a 2010 IGF finalist in the "excellence in design" category.
"Guide the spaceman through the castle and defeat the wizard" -- can't get any simpler than that. Do you need any more reason to blast your way through nine levels of old-school goodness? Didn't think so. Star Guard is a refined, minimalistic take on those 80s run-and-gun classics; like its predecessors, it focuses solely on fun and hits its mark (in the face with a laser beam, I might add.)
Developer Vacuum Flowers surgically applied Occam's razor to every aspect of design, and the high level of polish pays off. The pixel art and sound effects would feel at home on an Atari 2600, and would have been all the rage ten years before I was born. The game gives you the same verbs the first two NES Megaman titles had, and works quite well under these constraints. The enemy and level designs play off each other nicely, and blasting away baddies is...well, a blast. The only deviation from the norm is its difficulty. Not only do you get infinite lives, but when you respawn you turn invulnerable for a short period of time and can plow through enemies and traps. If you yearn for a challenge, though, just give Hard Mode a shot.
Nothing more needs to be said really. Have fun.
Have to play it all through
Have to play it all through in one sitting? I think for the easy mode that should have been taken out (for hardcore ghosts and goblins style play, fair enough, it fits there)
Otherwise there's an elegance in the old design - what you see is what it's about - there are no graphics of things which really are just pretties that aren't part of play at all (like alot of modern games have). Also it's nice to see other guys from your side in the levels, for some reason.
It rocks
I really enjoyed this. For such a minimalist design, it felt surprisingly atmospheric. And I loved the way the backstory was told via fragments of text scattered thoughout the level - very direct and accessible, yet doesn't interrupt the gameplay at all. Being someone who generally thinks that cutscenes were invented by the devil, I approve.
I also liked the way that the earlier levels had a whole bunch of friendly troops identical to the player character - added a lot of depth and made the game as a whole feel more "alive".
Sluggy controls, clipping
I wanted to like this game. I definitely enjoyed the minimalism and narrative presentation. But I could only hit the jump button so many times and have it fail leading to untimely death before the fun just disappeared. And I could only jump onto a stable structure only to fall past it into lava due to clipping issues so many times before the ESC key was the only button I wanted to push. It's a shame, because the game looks pretty cool.
Level Select
At the title screen you can press 1-9 to jump to that corresponding level; something I learned from reading the RPS comment section.
just another platformer
This game's style makes it feel like a little labor of love, which I appreciate. That was enough to carry me through the first few levels before I started getting impatient with the slow, methodical gameplay. After 8 levels I couldn't take it anymore. Ultimately this game is just joyless. Most challenges presented by the level design are trivially passed by waiting out of danger for a couple seconds until you can safely go in and kill or walk past the enemy.
The game is great, but it
The game is great, but it has two huge, game killing bugs:
* You can easily fall through platforms that are just 1 'pixel' thick, and most of them have lava waiting for you under them.
* The game is -very- unresponsive to pressing jump. In the 7th stage, there is a corridor where you have to constantly dodge 3 big projectiles comming your way; it was impossible for me because pressing the key 3 times wasn't enough to make my tiny green man jump once.
These issues get worse the slower the computer is.