Awesome Idea, Awesome Game
Love the game, my only problem with it is when there are a lot of particle on screen it gets a little laggy, which is expected. I couldn't tell if you used bitmaps or not for this because it was so fast, but if you didn't, I highly suggest using bitmap data
An incredible game, but ill-suited to this format.
This game wants to be on Xbox Live. Unfortunately, I'm accessing it from a mac, so not even FlashJoystick can help me. (My Nyko airflow was a bust, too.) I tried playing it a bit with the arrow keys, but even with judicious use of the shift key, it's just not happening for me. You absolutely *need* an analogue stick to make these kinds of precision turns.
That aside, this game is incredible. Surprisingly evocative techno music (Is this techno? Is it even legal for techno to BE evocative...?) heightens the mood in the void left by grey geometric visuals. Enemies are diverse and plentiful. Advancement happens at a breakneck pace, sometimes to a fault.
The most obvious thing this game brings to the table is the "ram the enemies" play mechanics. I don't know if I'd call it an anti-shooter. In my mind, an anti-shooter would involve collecting all the bullets, or perhaps managing an armada of weak enemies as they try to wipe out one powerful attacking ship. Maybe a better term would be a-shooter? A ram-'em up? I dunno. But anyway, your objective is simple, to ram the enemies before they can fire at you, or sometimes to dodge around their always-engaged natural defenses in order to hit them. There's probably a fine art to using boosts and slows that I was unable to master with the 4-direction movement offered by my keyboard. As far as I was able to progress, I found the game constantly dishing out new enemy types with new hazards.
And let's talk about progression. When you die, you cook off every enemy and bullet on the screen, an interesting choice, but due to the amount of skill involved in this game, it seems fair, almost compensating for your loss of a precious life by letting you skip to the next wave.
The star of the show has got to be the innovative "Trinity attack." Like everything else, I always had trouble zeroing in on an enemy using only the arrow keys. I'd often miss the enemy I was trying to tag, or else blast through two enemies at once, making a really narrow triangle for myself. But when it did work, it was incredibly satisfying, and I could see enjoying it very much with an analog stick.
I can't speak to the length, difficulty curve, character progression, or endgame, because I didn't make it that far. But this game has all the earmarks of being an instant classic. If only there were a way to release this game on XBLA. Oh, hey, there's that Wii console. That has an analog stick, doesn't it? Maybe you could look into that.
It's awesome to see a game this fresh on Newgrounds, but at the same time, it really doesn't play to the strengths of Flash (and the web) as a platform. This game desperately wants to live on a console, where EVERYONE has an analog stick and EVERYONE uses the same hardware and operating system.
Thanks for bringing us this gem, Bluebaby. I wasn't able to enjoy it as it was intended to be, but I know quality when I see it. I have a sneaking suspicion that I am missing out on a damn good game.
Hard X(
Yeah, it's hard but is a really cool game :D.
Very Cool
Very interesting and fun concept.
Points for originality too!
see below
great game, original, but too hard