Tag: astebreed

2002: Arcade Games are Alive and Well

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We live in an age where the default assumption about video games is that they will be big-budget affairs with star-studded voice casts, more pyrotechnics than a Michael Bay movie and, indeed, a budget to match. The reason for this is that many of the games that become household names — Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto — very much fall into this category, at least partly due to their marketing budget, but also due to their perceived “quality”. Games have moved on since their roots in the ’70s and ’80s, or so the popular theory seems to go, and we should be looking to our interactive entertainment for challenging creative works that offer interesting new spins on social themes; deep emotional narratives; and innovative play mechanics.

As someone who grew up roughly alongside the birth of gaming (give or take a few years; I wasn’t quite around for Pong) I think I speak for many other members of my cohort when I say that the above is all very well and good and should be celebrated when it’s done well, but sometimes all you want to do is shoot or punch the shit out of some things without having to think about anything too complicated.

Astebreed is a great shooter with a ton of immediacy but a rewarding amount of depth for those willing to learn its intricacies.
Astebreed is a great shooter with a ton of immediacy but a rewarding amount of depth for those willing to learn its intricacies.

One of the things I’ve been gratified to discover about the PlayStation 4 as a gaming platform is that it appears to be becoming an excellent home to a wide variety of arcade-style experiences as well as the big-budget, big-name games of today. The PC has been happily championing this sort of thing for a while thanks to its well-established digital distribution systems, and the Xbox 360 looked for a while like it might be assisting in the revitalisation of the “arcade-style” experience thanks to Xbox Live Arcade (which started to disappear up its own arse once things stopped costing 400 or 800 Microsoft Spacebux and instead took 1200 as the “default”) but I feel like this is a field where the PlayStation 4 in particular is really starting to come into its own.

While I’m still ploughing through Omega Quintet on PlayStation 4 (I’m approaching the Platinum trophy now, at last!), the last few games that I’ve bought and really enjoyed on the platform are all short, arcade-style, score attack-type titles that are just plain fun. None of them are trying to say anything particularly deep and meaningful (with the possible exception of Astebreed, which has one of the densest half-hour narratives I think you’ll ever find in a video game) and are instead focused on the simple joy of play: the thrill of taking on seemingly insurmountable odds, the fun of seeing scores climb into the millions, the satisfaction of beating your friends.

Blue Estate is pretty much a PS1/Dreamcast-era lightgun shooter, making good use of motion controls to approximate the arcade experience.
Blue Estate is pretty much a PS1/Dreamcast-era lightgun shooter, making good use of motion controls to approximate the arcade experience.

The games in question — and doubtless there are more, but these are the ones I’ve been particularly enjoying — include cinematic Japanese shoot ’em up Astebreed, Western bullet-hell shooter Jamestown+, the Defender-inspired Resogun, the inordinately satisfying rock-bursting shmup Super Stardust and lightgun-style rail shooter (a genre I thought was dead) Blue Estate. If you’re looking for a quick fix of gaming and don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and start chipping away at something more substantial like an RPG, I can happily and confidently recommend all of the above; they’re fun, they have a ton of immediate appeal but a lot of hidden depth, they’re easy to understand and teach to others (and, in most cases, have some form of multiplayer mode) and, for those concerned about such things, they’re cheap.

Smoky, beer-scented arcades may well be fast becoming a thing of the past, but the arcade-style experience still very much lives on at home on PS4… and on Vita too, for that matter, but that’s probably a whole other day’s post, so we’ll leave that for another day!

1993: The Joy of Smaller Games

You know me by now; I enjoy a good 100+ hour RPG that I can sink my teeth into over a long period of time, but I’m often reminded quite how much a short, simple, straightforward game can hit the spot on occasion.

There’s a lot of different places you can get this sort of experience, but I’ve been finding it particularly pleasant on the PlayStation 4 recently — thanks in part to freebies delivered through PlayStation Plus, and partly simply due to the selection of excellent, low-cost indie titles available on the platform.

Triple-A junkies are quick to whinge about the number of indie titles on PS4, particularly when they show up as PlayStation Plus freebies — they’re seen as “less valuable” somehow — but, in actual fact, the PS4 is a good home to them. Not only is the Dual Shock 4 eminently suitable for fast-paced arcade games — which a lot of these titles, which tend to channel retro sensibilities somewhat, err on the side of — but social features like the screenshot sharing, online leaderboards and live video broadcasting make otherwise solo experiences into much more compelling prospects that can be shared with others.

Most recently, I’ve been particularly enjoying a couple of games, and in many ways they are polar opposites of one another.

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The first is a title called Woah Dave, an Atari 2600-style platformer from the people who created the Bit Trip series a while back. Woah Dave is a deceptively simple but enormously addictive take on the Mario Bros/Bubble Bobble formula in that all you have to do is survive for as long as possible while fending off never-ending waves of enemies. You can jump, you can pick up things, you can throw them. That’s it. It gets more frantic as you progress, and the only reason to play is to try and get a high score. And that is reason enough.

Woah Dave is testament to the fact that strong gameplay will always be compelling and enjoyable, regardless of technical proficiency. That said, while the game looks like a mess of gigantic pixels in about 8 colours, it runs at a silky smooth framerate, with extremely responsive controls and a very enjoyable overall “feel” to the whole experience. It’s dumb and it’s silly and it’s shallow, but it’s a lot of fun.

Astebreed3

The other game I’ve been playing a bit recently is a shoot ’em up called Astebreed. I was a big fan of this when it originally released on PC, so I decided to “double dip” on the PlayStation 4 version, and haven’t been disappointed.

Astebreed is a beautiful-looking, 1080p, 60 frames per second cinematic shoot ’em up in which you pilot a giant mecha with some unconventional weapons systems as you attempt to fend off the unwanted advances of alien race the Filune. Along the way you learn more about their human experimentation and the true fate of your adoptive father and his two daughters, who have been made into living parts of a Filune reality alteration system that has the potential to be used as a deadly weapon.

The plot is pure anime — and, frankly, a little difficult to follow, given that a lot of it unfolds while the action is coming thick and fast on screen, leaving little time to read subtitles — but it’s snappy, pacy, dramatic and even a little emotional. Unlockable documents that you can read after clearing the game once show that the game world, setting and backstory have been very comprehensively fleshed out, too, and the whole experience is wonderfully polished until it shines.

I’m still rubbish at it, though.