Shmup

Cactus is, it appears, unstoppable. He's a craftsman, and a living testament that it only takes a short time to design a game. In the indie game community, the 22-year-old Swede is looked upon as the gold standard of agility and style, with many being periodically infected with a disease known as "Cactus Envy". Now is an interesting time to review his work in that light, since a wave of content creation engines will allow less multi-talented designers to be cured of their Cactus Envy, and make similarly idiosyncratic games on similar time-scales.

Clean Asia! is a hardcore shmup that consists wholly of boss battles, carried in what appears to be vector graphics. There are three levels (called Thailand, New Korea, and China, hence the title), with different boss behaviors for each. What's unique and original about the game, however, is that your objective isn't so much shooting enemies as smashing enemies into debris, and then collecting that debris magnetically.

Battleships Forever -- a finalist in the "design innovation" category at this year's Independent Games Festival -- is billed by its designer, Sean Chan, as a space RTS. Actually, it's real-time tactics rather than strategy -- no diplomacy, no resource extraction or building construction, and here at PTT!, we are nothing if not anal in our identification of (and support for) obscure genres.

It's also very nice indeed, despite the occasional crash bug (but it's not yet up to version 1.0, so we may hope these will be taken care of).

Cactus! Cactus! You wicked alchemist, you mercurial son of a bitch! You're too fucking good!

This is a shmup made in 12 hours that can be played in a minute. It's the latest in a long series of shmups made by this prickly, lone genius that takes a tired genre and deconstructs it with the delicate care of a surgeon back by generous morphine. Have you ever tried morphine? I worked at a hospital one summer... that first minute, its like this game.

Perhaps the fact that I like this game as much as I do says more about my lameness than anything else. See, shameful as it is to admit, I suck at most shmups. I mean, I like the genre conceptually, and I like the fact that some create beautiful, almost abstract visuals during gameplay, and I appreciate the intensity of attention they demand to play well, but the sad fact is that I'm a 40-something gamer who cut his teeth on Panzerblitz and not Zaxxon, let alone Space Giraffe. I just don't have the reflexes nor the long-honed l33t sk1llz to do more than flail about and die ignominously in most shmups. But I can actually play Crusaders of Space 2, and enjoy it.

Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) said of Jets'n'Guns, "This game puts forth a level of 'America, Fuck Yeah!' excess that has not been seen since Total Carnage." Patrick Dugan calls it "the riff ripping explosionary wargasm shmup fans have been waiting for."

Yes, the basics of the gameplay derive from Defender--it's a sidescrolling shmup in which you can 'flip' your ship to move and fire either right or left, and enemies approach from both sides of the screen. But Alien Abduction features trippy late-80s graphics, excellent sound and music, 30 levels, and 3 gameplay modes.

Starscape is a great example how a small team that knows what its doing can pack a lot of gameplay into a small package--and Moonpod, a team of long-term industry vets turned indie, know precisely what they're doing.

At its heart, Starscape is a space "shmup" (shoot-em-up) with the kind of fast, intense shooting action you expect in a game of that style; but layered atop that is a game of resource management and tech development.

...And quarters, rather than dollars, it would be; Gamma Bros feels very much like a game you'd encounter on an arcade machine in, say, 1985, probably one with two joysticks, like Robotron (actually, you use the arrow keys to move and WASD to shoot in the four cardinal directions). It's a space shoot-'em-up (shmup), but unlike the frenetic madness of most shmups, it has a laid-back, almost relaxing feel.

A fun little game--and a finalist at the 2007 Independent Games Festival.

nullpointer is a digital artist who experiments with algorithmically generated digital imagery. Playing around with fractals, he decided that rather than simply exposing people to pretty pictures, he wanted them to interact with the imagery. And being a serious fan of old-school shmups, he created this game in which you interact with the images by (what would you expect?) shooting them.