6 Games - One Post

This week's post is something new and exciting, at least for this site. I've done a few roundups before, as you may recall, but until now they've been split up into multiple posts and, more importantly, have been games or mods by entirely different teams/individuals. All that and more goes out the window, and this week's one-post-roundup is devoted entirely to the arcade shooters by Kenta Cho.

The word "abstract" can often be in the same sentence as the title of any of the games I'm about to mention today, which is very fitting. I'd imagine that these games are what people thought the future of gaming would look like, back when Space Invaders was hot shit. They're all simple to pick up and play, and absolutely mesmerizing to look at. From the fast paced intensity of Parsec47, to the art-deco simplicity of noiz2sa - from the boss fight after boss fight of rRootage, to the "reinforce your ship with parts of theirs" mechanic of Tumiki Fighters - from the evade and conquer dynamic of A7Xpg, to the WipeOut meets Tempest bliss that is my favorite, Torus Troopers, there's an awful lot of variety here.

While, for me at least, none of these games are going to keep you playing for hour after hour, each one is perfect for a quick half-hour of fun, or whatever amount of time you may need to kill. The learning curve is steeper for some games than others, but even the strangest can be picked up within a matter of minutes. The graphics for each game follow the theme of "retro-futuristic", and while each game uses OpenGL for some awesome effects, there's a simplicity to the graphics that is very refreshing in this day and age. The only game that doesn't have strictly 2D gameplay is Torus Troopers, my aforementioned favorite. That's not the reason for my affinity for the game - the intensity factor is - but I'm definitely looking forward to some more 3D oriented gameplay if Kenta decides to do some more games in the future.

Each of these games is very polished. I haven't encountered any bugs with a single game, and each one seems a finished game, not a work in progress. Plus, the fact the so many of these games are very random in execution certainly ups the replayablity factor quite a bit. Each download is under 10mb, some a quite a bit smaller - so there's no excuse for anyone reading this right now to not download them immediately. By the way, Windows versions are available for all you non-Linux types.