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Hotline Miami has received a lot of attention lately for being somewhat of an indie darling on the PC and with the game gearing up for a PSN release, we figured now is a good time for the AO crew to dig into the game and give you our two cents on the bloody romp through 1980′s Miami. Please enjoy.
PS: Eff the dogs
If Xbox Live Indie Games was Santa and I was a prospective present recipient, you’d think I would have been judged ‘naughty’ with all the coal I’ve received this year. Suffice to say, 2012 hasn’t been a banner year for the service. But after playing Bleed, it might have all been worth it. Bootdisk Revolution has put together something truly special and any gamer with a love for the classics would be remiss to pass it up.
The objective in Bleed is simple: Defeat the world’s best heroes to become the newest member of the Hall of Heroes. Your quest takes you through the home bases of each of the world’s six champions, plus one final stage afterward. Each one has a theme that matches the style of its owner. The extravagant and creepy mansion belongs to the gelatinous slime ball with the googly eyes and fly wings. The security-intensive high rise houses the defense robot with a penchant for homing missiles.
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It’s rare to find a game that seems like it tried to work in literally every idea discussed during brainstorming, but Arkedo’s Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit feels like a shining example of that phenomenon. The production value is high, tons of effort went into the writing and the gameplay is relatively unique. But in bringing so many individual elements together, the game as a whole somehow manages to be nearly devoid of fun.
Things are as off-the-wall as they can be in Hell Yeah. You’re the Prince of Hell — a dead rabbit who rides around in a saw-blade hovercraft — and your mission is to recover scandalous pictures of you and your rubber duck, which would somehow undermine the validity of your claim to the throne. Or something like that. The unapologetically random nature of the game’s core concept extends to everything else in the game, from enemy design to level settings, so don’t expect fire and brimstone here — Dante’s vision this is not. There are casinos, futuristic dance clubs and what can only be described as Jerry Garcia’s wet dream, among a bunch of other areas. The game’s spastic, sugar-coated ADD-inducing presentation might appeal to high school students who spend their parents’ money at Hot Topic, but it’s truthfully nothing more than a bunch of incoherent nonsense that’s random for the sake of being random.
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When someone thought up the name “Happy Wars”, they must have been smoking an “oxymoron” controlled substance…or so I thought. With a name like Happy Wars it has to be a fun filled romp through the flowers right? You’ll just have to watch the video and find out. You know you wanna…
There’s no denying that Wayforward has solidified themselves as one of the go-to development studios when it comes to higher profile, retro-styled 2D games. Some of their projects have turned out to be fantastic, like the wonderful Mighty Switch Force on the Nintendo 3DS. Others, like Bloodrayne Betrayal, are a bit behind on the quality curve. Double Dragon Neon is their latest effort to recapture the shine of decades-gone-by. Any reservations the studio’s varying quality may have caused should be dismissed — this is a great revival of a truly influential property.
Neon is about as over-the-top as a game based on an established property can be. It feels like a caricature of the late 1980s in many ways. The Dragon Twins — Billy and Jimmy — are a couple of carefree, wisecracking karate experts. The amount of puns that come out of their mouths, clever or embarrassing, recall the spirit of a quartet of fighting reptile siblings. The villain is in the running for my favorite enemy of 2012, and while he feels like he’d be more at home on Eternia he seems to fit in almost perfectly here as well.
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What can possibly be fun about assembling electrical circuits? Placing resistors to reduce electric current to power components? Can that really make an appealing game? Guess you just have to watch the video and find out. Enjoy!
[Note: The audio came out a little quiet. Sorry.]
We’ve all had hopes of being recognized for our hard work, being able to make a sustainable living from it, and have others appreciate it. For developer Humble Hearts, and lead man Dean Dodrill, he’s living that dream. Initially an employee of a Triple-A team, Dodrill would later go indie and enter Microsoft’s annual Dream.Build.Play competition. He would submit Dust: An Elysian Tail and win in 2009. After winning the promotion Dodrill earned a coveted spot on Microsoft’s XBLA service, where him and the team at Humble Hearts have been working effortlessly since winning. What would ensue can only be described as a beautiful culmination of gameplay and art.
Dust solidifies itself as one of the most aesthetically pleasing games on XBLA, if not on the Xbox 360 as a whole. Still frames don’t do it justice, as it is an absolute visual pleasure to behold in motion. Beautiful, hand-drawn characters match the quality of a Disney production, as do the lush environments, ripe with flowing water, fauna weaving with the wind, and dynamic weather effects. At one moment I could find myself exploring a village brimming with sunlight, only to have it begin raining on me the next.
Genres within gaming can see parallels to food at a feast. One dish may find itself more appetizing to one individual’s taste than another, but there is always that temptation to taste what is outside of your comfort zone. For many, adventure games fall into this category. The slow, methodical gameplay and often deep storylines are seen as a crux in a world where military shooters reign king and action-heavy MMOs grasp the attention of millions. On occasion, however, one dish comes along that makes us want to extend our palette and taste outside of familiarity.
Those who are concerned with the connotation of adventure games being overly difficult can find solace in this fact: Resonance gently ramps up the challenge and slowly introduces gameplay mechanics at a speed which allows you to fully grasp what the game is capable off before letting you go on your own. You initially play as one of four characters, one at a time, before being granted the ability to seamlessly transition between two characters in the same scene in later stages. Once the prologue is complete the world is your oyster: All four characters are at your disposal at all times, and each are necessary to advance the plot as they may hold a bit of information that the others do not possess.
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