1677: Twin Sticks

I love a good twin-stick shooter, though I must confess I wasn’t really aware of it as a sub-genre of the shoot ’em up until Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360. (Fun fact: that game, more than any of the other early titles on that console, was the reason I picked up my own 360. Fast forward a generation and I find myself unable to justify a PS4 for Resogun — a game which is, admittedly, jolly good. Hmm.) I guess I was sort of aware of it with Smash TV on the Super NES — and what I thought was an extremely peculiar control scheme when I played it — but I never played the original Robotron or anything.

Since Geometry Wars, though, I’ve been a big fan of the twin-stick shooter, and it occupies a similar tier of affection in my brain to Japanese “bullet hell” shooters.

It was Geometry Wars 2 that truly cemented my love of this shmup sub-genre — and it was partly a result of the growing world of online console gaming. These days, we take online leaderboards and multiplayer functionality for granted — hell, it’s in most mobile phone games — but in the earlier days of the 360, online functionality was still new and exciting. And Geometry Wars 2, although it handled it incredibly simply, worked brilliantly.

All Geometry Wars 2 offered in terms of online functionality was a separate leaderboard for each of its game modes, with the display of your friends’ scores prioritised. While you were playing, the upper-right corner of the screen displayed the next friend’s score that you needed to beat to move up a spot on the leaderboard, and it was surprising how enormously distracting this could be — to such a degree that some people even advocated putting masking tape over the corner of your TV so you weren’t tempted to look while playing.

It worked brilliantly, though, and all the more so for the fact that, when Geometry Wars 2 came out, absolutely everyone was playing it. Herein, however, lies something of a mixed blessing: while the games industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar behemoth since that time, the sheer number of games around at any given moment these days means that it’s become gradually less and less likely that we’ll ever have a communal, shared, international experience like that ever again. Games like Geometry Wars 2 are now considered by some to be too simple for computers and consoles, instead finding a “better” home on mobile. (I’d question whether or not it’s actually “better”, however, since mobile phone control schemes for this sort of game still suck immense quantities of balls.)

That, thankfully, doesn’t mean there aren’t still devs making these games, however. In fact, two of my current favourite non-narrative games are relatively recent twin-stick shooters: Assault Android Cactus on PC (coming soon to various other platforms) and Super Stardust Delta on Vita.

Assault Android Cactus is the work of small Australian independent developer Witch Beam. I was completely unaware of the game prior to the Eurogamer Expo last year but a chance encounter with a preview build a few days prior caused me to frantically schedule an appointment with the developer’s representative, who had flown over especially for the show. Their enthusiasm for their game was infectious — and it was clear they’d done their homework, citing classic Japanese shmups as their inspiration for the game, which despite being a twin-stick shooter very much had its own identity. Today, the game is still in Early Access on Steam awaiting its finishing touches, but it’s already one of the finest shooters I’ve ever had the good fortune to play. I can’t wait to take it on the go with the Vita.

Super Stardust Delta, meanwhile, is a twin-stick shooter from Finnish developer Housemarque and, I didn’t realise, a distant offshoot of a series that originally began back on the Amiga. Combining elements of Asteroids, Geometry Wars and Ikaruga, Super Stardust Delta is, once again, proof that you can take a simple base mechanic — twin-stick shooting — and make it into something unique and enjoyable. It’s also one of the most beautiful-looking games on the Vita, so if you want something for Sony’s underappreciated handheld with which to impress people, it’s a fine choice.

Anyway, the beauty of a good twin-stick shooter is that a single play session is only short. So I think I’m going to go sit in bed and play Super Stardust Delta for a bit before sleep. That sounds like a good way to close out my last week of freedom before work starts next week!