Video games: A Shooter For Your Everyday Life
I’d mentioned in an earlier post that I think sound and music is an essential part of the game experience. That’s why I have a place in my heart for games that tie music into the core gameplay experience, games like Rez and Audiosurf.
So when I saw Everyday Shooter had come to Steam games, I decided to risk $9 on it.
That was definitely $9 well spent.
Everyday Shooter is similar to Robotron or the more recent Geometry Wars that first made a splash on Xbox Live Arcade. The arrow keys control which way you move, WASD controls which way you shoot. Bullets and enemies appear on the screen and you blow them up. It’s pretty simple.
The twist here is that each level has a different “chaining mechanism” that lets you destroy swaths of enemies at a time. In the first one, cubes float by that, when shot, open up into explosions that trigger other explosions in enemies that touch it which trigger more explosions and so on, not unlike the “Ender’s Game” Little Doctor. In the second level, blobs appear that feed to each other by pulsing lines, and blowing up one in the chain will destroy the others it’s pulsing to.
The game doesn’t tell you how each level works. You just have to figure it out from watching the abstract 3D graphics.
The graphics may be plain, but they’re suited to the action. They don’t get in the way when the screen fills with bullets and enemies, unlike Shooter’s abstract cousin Space Giraffe, which, despite the protestations of its creator, is basically unplayable.
The other hook for Everyday Shooter is that the music is modified by what you’re doing in the game, similar to the aforementioned Rez. Whether you’re collecting dots or shooting blobs, each action layers a strummy guitar riff on top of a base song. Somehow it manages to sound coherent, even up to the final dischordant twang when you lose a life.
The music affects the game in one other important way: each level is only as long as its song. If you’re going for points, which can then be used to unlock new features in the game, you’re on a time budget.
This is the sort of game that gets trotted out whenever an “Are Games Art?” discussion starts, but I wouldn’t worry about that. Everyday Shooter is just plain fun.
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Space Giraffe is utterly playable! It’s something I’ve been playing for at least 5 hours a week every week since it release last August! To dismiss it as ‘basically unplayable’ shows how little you know about games and how poor you are at them. Space Giraffe is without question the finest 360 game out there and in my to 5 games of all time. Shame on you. If it’s too hard just confess that you’re 12 years old and that you can’t play a proper game without it being dumbed down to 12yr old levels. Don’t blame the game that some of us regard as the finest shooter ever created.
In the interest of Internet fairness, I am willing to expand “basically unplayable” into “impenetrable and off-putting to most, if appealing to a niche of hardcore enthusiasts.”
BUT THAT’S AS FAR AS I’M WILLING TO GO, MISTER.