Tag: resogun

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!

1936: Modern Old-School

One of the games I’ve been playing a bunch on my shiny new PlayStation 4 is Resogun, a game that I was previously moderately excited about, and which, prior to Omega Quintet (and, arguably, Final Fantasy Type-0, which I’m interested to try at some point in the near future) was a game I often cited as the only (then-current) reason that I’d be interested in a PlayStation 4.

But it wasn’t enough by itself to make me want to buy one. For a new platform to be truly compelling for me, there needs to be some long-form games that I’m interested in, whereas Resogun is an arcade game, intended to be enjoyed in relatively short bursts. This isn’t a criticism of it, mind, but I’d have had a tough time justifying a PlayStation 4 purchase to myself purely on the strength of what is, essentially, next-gen Defender.

But oh, what a game Resogun actually is! I’m still skeptical of whether I’d have found it worth buying a PS4 for by itself — although in retrospect, I bought an Xbox 360 primarily because of Geometry Wars, which is even more simplistic than Resogun — but I’m absolutely in love with it, because it represents a true fusion between classic old-school arcade-style gameplay and modern presentation.

At its core, as previously noted, Resogun is similar to the classic arcade game Defender. You fly a little ship that can move and fire left and right at will. Like Defender, the game unfolds on a scrolling, wrapping stage, though here it’s represented as a cylinder that you fly around the outer surface of. Like Defender, your job is to save little green humans from being abducted by invading alien flying saucers. Unlike Defender, there’s significantly more to it than that.

For starters, the humans are held in captivity before you can rescue them. In order to do so, you need to destroy “Keepers” — special enemies that show up every so often with a green glow surrounding them. You’ll get an audible announcement when some Keepers show up, but not a visual indicator showing where they are if they’re around the other side of the level, so you’ll need to find and destroy them quickly to save the human in question, because if you miss any of them — or, in some cases, destroy them in the wrong order — the human will immediately die. Succeed, however, and the human will pop out of his little prison box and start running around on the ground, at which point he becomes vulnerable to being abducted, falling into holes, drowning and being splattered by unpleasant things. He also becomes available to be picked up by your ship and transported to one of the rescue pods at the top of the level.

To complete a level, you need to proceed through three “phases”. Each phase requires you to destroy a certain amount of enemies represented by a bar filling up at the bottom of the screen. When you complete a phase, you get a brief “time out” where you can still move and fire, but you’re invincible and the enemies move in slow-motion. This allows you a moment to compose yourself and get yourself into an advantageous position before proceeding. The end of the third phase, however, jumps directly into a boss battle, with bosses taking the form of various peculiar geometric shapes that warp and twist before your very eyes as you shoot chunks off them and chip away at their energy bar. When the boss is dead, the whole level explodes and you move on to the next one. Repeat for five levels, beat game.

Except that’s not all that there is to Resogun — at least not with the excellent DLC packages that have been released since it originally came out. Between these two packages (available as a bundle or individually) there are several new modes, including Survival, which places you on a single level and tasks you with surviving through a series of increasingly difficult days, acquiring power-ups by picking up humans; Protector, which requires you to deliver humans to cities to rebuild them and subsequently defend them from giant alien flying saucers; Commando, which casts you as a human attempting to protect his house from falling meteors in scenes somewhat reminiscent of Missile Command for a new generation; and Challenge, which gives you a series of unconventional ways to play the game and tasks you with completing some generally pretty fiendish objectives.

Resogun is unabashedly a score-attack game, and consequently it naturally comes with online support, allowing you to compare your scores both to your friends and the rest of the world’s players. You can also filter these scores by time, allowing you to challenge friends each week or month to see who is truly the best (this week/month), and scores are tracked completely independently for each mode and difficulty setting.

Combine this with a robust ship editor, allowing you to create your own custom ships using the 3D “voxel” pixels from which the entire game is built (and which it is very fond of exploding things into at a moment’s notice) and the ability to share said creations online and you have a remarkably “complete”-feeling package that, now I’ve spent some time with it, I’m pretty confident in recommending as an essential purchase for anyone with a PlayStation 4. (Assuming you like shooting things and watching numbers go up. And who doesn’t like shooting things and watching numbers go up?)

So yeah. Buy Resogun. You won’t regret it.