Platform Shooter

If you like Game and Adventure, SUPER BIG GUN ADVENTURE for you! Shoot enemy! Shoot down to move over lava! Shoot more enemy! Are you gentleman enough to save yourself from other gentleman with smaller gun!!??? ...I'll stop now. This game is my choice pick from the Game Jolt Minimalist compo, and reminded me why I dig indie games so much. One interesting mechanic as its crux, chunky graphics, and thinly veiled innuendo via intentional Engrish. Nice time waster, and the chiptune soundtrack is catchy too.

Your expectations> Fuck 'em. They don't apply here. Sure, this game starts out innocently enough, with simple Megaman gameplay and graphics strangely reminiscent of Cave Story. As derivative as it is, you'll probably appreciate the polish to it and truck through the unimaginative fluff that this game is. Then, you'll encounter a seemingly typical boss fight; after which things get interesting. Care to fathom the depths of this critique after you play this thing?

Take the color palette of The End of Evangelion mixed with the stench of industrial rock and foribly graft it onto the flesh of run-and-gun platformers replete with the WASD/mouse combo. Spice it with the end of the world, perhaps a few scenes from The Invisibles and a first person plural writing penchant adapted from System Shock 2. The result is All Of Our Friends Are Dead, a hell of a good way to spend an hour and a must add to any tripper´s playlist.

Iji is a nice, nostalgia-inducing game of a type you don't often see any more -- a 2D platform shooter. There's some story in which the eponymous character, Iji has to make her way through an underground research facility that's been taken over by aliens, but what's more important is eight weapons, an RPG-like system to improve your character (and what you choose to uprgrade can make one character quite different from another), lots of secret areas, and multiple story paths.

There are plenty of amazing platform shooters out there. Metroid. Gunstar. Contra. None of these games can quite compare to Cave Story, though.

Released in late 2004, Cave Story harkens back to a simpler time. The graphics are 8-bit, and yet they manage to be beautiful. The music consists entirely of chiptunes, and yet it's some of the best composed video game music I've ever listened to. And the gameplay? Fantastic.

Robotopia is a cheerful sidescrolling shooter with a color palette remniscent of the arcade, in which you control a robot who can fly, zapping a huge variety of opponents and bosses. The single-player game has scads of challenging levels (ten in the demo); you level up over time and can purchase new weapons and equipment, for an RPG-like experience. And once you've gotten good at the controls (see below), you can go online* and battle others in deathmatch, "capture-the-flag" or "bounty-hunting" play.

That's Gibbage as in "gibs," from "giblets"--the body parts strewn across the screen in FPS games like Doom and Quake.

Gibbage is a truly odd and heart-warmingly gory game that combines the mechanics of retro platformers with the aesthetic of the modern first-person shooter. The graphics are cartoony, and would not look amiss on a NES or pre-CD-ROM PC; the gameplay is deathmatch shooting madness. Your avatar runs and leaps about, gathering powerups and dispatching your foe with massive firepower, a 3D game's gibs replaced with pixellated blood.

Here's another genre they don't make any more--2D third-person platform shooters, like Duke Nuke'm back before the Duke went 3D. Developed pretty much by one guy (Dusan Stevanovic), it's a damn impressive effort for a one-man shop. If hopping about and blowing crap up sounds good to you, well, pally, that's what the download link is for, eh?