3rd Person Shooter

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.

Realm of the Mad God takes the compulsion loop of a conventional MMO and boils it down to its essential nutrient broth, eschewing all the frippery and getting down to what such games are all about: Kill, loot, level-up, kill some more.

With NES-level pixellated graphics, frenetic top-down shooter play with WASD movement, and permadeath, it feels like a game from another era, yet informed by the tropes and techniques we've come to expected in dikuMUD-likes; games from another era are not, obviously, browser-games and massively multiplayer. It's a game that might have been developed in 1985, if we had an Internet in 1985.

Alien Swarm is a third person, squad-based, 3D shooter. There are four classes; you control one marine, while the AI or other players in online play control the other three. The game bears a striking resemblance to the Space Hulk board game or its digital port, Alien Assault. Like Alien Assault, it is mission-based, with different goals for victory in each mission.

10 Second War is kind of a neat little game. Minimalist in graphics and gameplay -- WASD to move and mouse to shoot -- it exploits one clever idea: You have a series of units to control, and in 10 seconds you must destroy all enemies in the level. But you control only one unit at a time -- then select another one to control. The second time around, your first unit is moving the way you told it to the first time, and killing any enemies it manages to get before dying, in the same timed sequence; with your second unit, you try to get more. And then a third unit, with the first two moving and firing...

danman says:
While I enjoy PTT's arty take on videogame culture, I also enjoy playing games where I get to blow shit up. Or, indeed, shoot monsters in the face.

Never let it be said that we don't aim to please.

Day Traders of the Dead is a Robotron-esque game (or perhaps more closely, a Smash TV-like game -- both Eugene Jarvis designs, of course). WASD to move, mouse to aim, hold the left mouse button down for continuous fire, kill zombies galore.

The links section up there only lets me provide four links (my bad), so here's the Amiga demo, should you actually want it.

It may not surprise you to know that I look at a lot of indie games, and that a great may I spend only a few minutes with, because life is too short. Those are the ones that don't normally get reviewed here. Going into BOH, I expected it to be like that. Way retro graphics, manual with lots of widgets in it, ugly website, 3D overhead shooter, a genre done to death many years ago, and Amiga support, forsooth! Should be a quick no.

And then I found myself on the fifth level.

Dragon and Weed is a sidescrolling 2D shooter with a kickass rock soundtrack and nicely hand-drawn background graphics. Challenges vary a bit with level, and so while fairly short, it's likely to hold your interest, if you like this style of game.

Cactus's Lovecraft Game is a quick vignette he developed for a TIG Source competition. By "vignette," I mean this isn't a completed game, and is missing some of the things we normally expect from games, like a quantifiable outcome. But as is typical of Cactus's efforts, it gets a lot of points for sheer style.

Robokill is a classic overhead third-person shooter; WASD or arrow keys to move, aim with the mouse and shoot with the left mouse button. For a Flash game, it's very smooth and responsive; as with other games of the same style (e.g., RIP), it's fast and frenetic, and survival means continuous motion while maintaining a continuous stream of fire.

It's somewhat arena-like, in that each level is a room within a space station that's been taken over by hostile robots. There are the usual powerups, health packs, and the like, along with an experience system, and shops where you can upgrade your equipment (and buy more health). Enemy AI is simple but clean, and all in all, this feels less like a Flash game than a downloadable, that is, it doesn't have the slow-downs and glitches you often see with Flash, and yet there's a lot more gameplay here than with most Flash titles. (I do wish there were a full-screen mode, though; occasionally I found myself clicking outside the Flash window and losing control of the game, since mouse position is less vital than direction, so it's easy to wind up with the pointer outside the game area and click to fire...)

The game isn't wholly free; there's a ten buck charge if you want access to the second two thirds of the game, but the first third alone has a couple of hours of gameplay, which isn't bad.

There's nothing hugely original here, but it's well executed, and shooter fans should like it.

Night of the Cephalopods is an 8-bit 2D third-person shooter (8b2d3p?) in which you play a fellow with a shot gun being attacked by floaty octopi and trying to survive until dawn. Ammo is limited, so you basically wander around looking for more and blowing the octopi away when you need to, but otherwise husbanding ammo.