Retro

Hotline Miami is a brutally difficult, brutally violent, top-down brawler and shooter. With retro, 90s-style graphics, it has something of a feel of a Sega Genesis game -- not a SNES one; Nintendo would never have let anything this violent on their platform, but Sega was edgier.

You're assigned your missions via mobile phone by strange people who wear animal masks and claim to know all about you, though you're apparently amnesiac. The story, such as it is, is a somewhat surreal one, but it's a transparently thin veneer to provide some strange context for what's simply a game of killing everyone on each stage.

You can pick up a variety of both melee weapons and firearms; it's possible to play it stealthily, sneaking up on enemies and dispatching them hand-to-hand, or simply to blast away. Enemies are alerted by the sound of gunfire, though. Additional weapons are unlocked over time, as are additional animal masks; each mask provides a special power, and you can choose among them to suit your strategy.

Abobo's Big Adventure is a crackpot homage to the NES, featuring Abobo, a boss from Double Dragon. It's a pretty vast game, for all its 8-bitness, given that it's Flash freeware.

Over the course of many levels, Abobo deals with a huge number of enemies -- seemingly every damn character that ever appeared in a NES game, though I'm sure that's not the case. The controls are NES-simple -- arrows to move, attacks with A and S -- but the gameplay changes drastically from level to level. At first, you think it's basically a Streetfighter-style game -- but the next level is more like an underwater Mario level.

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, no wait, that's a play by Charles Busch, I mean Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars is a Wizard of Wor-like game from Anna Anthropy, the auteur who brought you games like Mighty Jill Off and When Pigs Fly. It's on Adult Swim.

I was raised on graphic adventure games --they were the first videogames I ever played and have profoundly influenced my approach to games ever since. I was also raised on The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, so naturally I jumped at the chance to write about the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Remake, or H2G2 Remake for short. Unfortunately, it seems you can't turn back the clock.

From the creator of Iji comes an even more crystalline instance of retro-craft. Hero Core strips down the form of a closed-circuit, 2D macro-level design to its bare pixels, two colors, 8-bit sound or something like it. This is the hard core of a gem fashioned over eons of geophysical activity, or in this case the creator's nights of labor and detail. It's so basic it's sick. Tiny bits of text create context. It unfolds like an onion blocked up in white pixel groups.

What is it about pandemics? We've had a rash of them recently, and here's another. In this one, though, the pandemic is the zombie apocalypse.

Most games with zombies are horror apocalypse; in this one, you are, by implication, a mad scientist unleashing the zombie apocalypse on the world. It's played in a series of stages, each one set in a "city"; you trigger a zombie infection, then watch as your zombies eat the brains of citizens, sweeping your pointer about to collect coins when they die. Then, you upgrade your zombie capabilities in the "Lab." At higher levels, the humans fight back with mercs, secret agents, Spiderman, Santa Claus and other such things who are harder to infect and who fight your zombies, possibly stopping the infection before you collect lots of coins. Luckily, you get bombs and such to blow them up as an upgrade.

Instead of posting about an imitation of an old-school platformer today, how's 'bout I give you a slice of the real deal? You most likely haven't come across this as it was only released in Japan and, erm, Scandinavia. Which is a damn shame, as this is my favorite title to grace the NES. As someone who swears by Mighty Bomb Jack, Capcom's Disney-licensed titles, and all the usual suspects this isn't said lightly. The game was developed by Sunsoft, who admittedly have a less than stellar track record (Aero the Acrobat? Ugh.) This game is their unsung masterpiece, however, and deserves your attention. There was a great deal of love put into this, and is readily apparent in every aspect of aesthetics and design. If you're into platformers this cult-classic title shouldn't be missed.

This game is fresher than a Snapple, do you remember Snapple? It was in tight competition with Lipton Brisk. This game is brisker than a cute animal wielding a bazooka, who must be brisk lest he take too much risk.

We've already established that retro is a sort of cancerous fetish and/or celebratory exercise in practical limitations, it's one or the other, or both. We've seen retro sweep over the platformer genre like a plague of locusts, devouring every possible variation on physics, level design, goal-orientation, character development, and aesthetic. The term Metroidvania has been viciously defiled, mutilated strung upside down in a mock crucifixion. Now Zelda-style games are being descended upon, we can only expect a skeleton to remain in the wake. But for now, it's time to feast!

From the makers of the excellent DinoRun comes another exploration of mayhem in Atari drapings, laced with sweat and 8-bit MIDI. Mountain Maniac has you playing an estranged dwarf hammering out boulders from a mountain top to destroy a city below. Its like Pachinko meets Rampage with a suitably pissed off Scandavian midget going where no Southpark character has gone before. The joy of watching the boulder fall, the comedy of emergent timing as it crushes a bald eagle, narrowly misses the sasquatch and destroys a major bank, it almost makes you forgot that you can influence the boulder's path. I'm not sure which is better, having more control or having more looney tunes comedy as people's homes and lives are ruined by sheer physics.

The Black Heart has the best production values of any free game ever released. It is dope as fuck. I mean, I try to use sophisticated language when describing games, but some times, times such as this, there is no phrase that could be more appropriate than saying: this game is awesomely, extremely, manifestly dope as fuck. Are you with me?