Showing posts with label Housemarque. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Housemarque. Show all posts

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Nex Machina

From the creators of Resogun, Nex Machina uses the same voxel concept but the gameplay is akin of Smash TV and Robotron, the classic arcade games I have never played before. I might have seen review videos from Classic Game Room that have Robotron but not Smash TV although the concept may seem to be similar or something. The legendary game designer, Eugine Jarvis, had teamed up with Housemarque to work on the new arcade-style game.
There may be rumors about the arcade release in which Housemarque will have to team up with Raw Thrills and some of the rumors are in the form of the arcade cabinet concept. The game may feature Co-Op like always and the behavior seems to be better than the Local Co-Op in Resogun. The Online Co-Op in Resogun is already a better idea than Local Co-Op although Nex Machina can have both Local and Online Co-Ops just fine.
Like Resogun, the design is quite interesting. In Resogun, the surrounding areas caught in the blast get scattered away whether you boost, use Overdrive, get hit by the enemy or destroy the enemy. In Nex Machina, the same causes the area to produce the pixellated shockwave. The way the area produces the shockwave is that parts of the area get turned into cubes before returning back to normal. Even some of the different weapons you use cause the pixellated shockwave as well.
When destroying stuffs in Nex Machina, things get broken into voxels but unlike Resogun, they don't produce glows and particles when destroyed. There may be projectiles in some stages that actually cause real explosions in Nex Machina but that's pretty much that. When you lose a life, you are scattered into pieces with trails of glows. They cause particles when they collide with a wall or something. The same effect occurs when the boss is defeated. Unlike Resogun, what you'll see after defeating the boss is a bunch of tiny cubes acting as the sea objects. In Resogun, after defeating the boss, the whole place is being blasted where the ship escapes.
My point is that there should be explosions when the machines in Nex Machina get destroyed but instead, the machines are taken for deranged toys. Also, the game may be difficult with trial and error type gameplay in which every time you lose a life, the current phase you're in restarts.
Lastly, the soundtrack has a similar style to Resogun but it has three composers this time. Some of the songs already had given me the good and interesting impression. Not to mention that the game's soundtrack is available on ITunes and I already paid for the main vocalized theme. Indeed, you can either buy one track, or the entire album in the ITunes music store.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Super Stardust Ultra

To be frank, I've never played any of Housemarque games before. The interesting discovery of Housemarque games started with Resogun for Playstation 4 which is one of the launch games. It is also available on Playstation 3 and Vita with downgraded visuals. It was seriously interesting from what I saw like tons of vowels and particles scattered on screen that it takes up the most amount of hardware resources of Playstation 4 system. The Playstation 3 and Vita versions are having those things reduced while leaving various graphical effects intact. However, the Playstation 4 has additional game modes that other versions don't have like those DLC exclusive modes that inlcude Protector Mode, Demolition Mode, Challenge, Commando Mode and so on.
For Super Stardust Ultra, the planets look different and so are the spacey backgrounds. Even the soundtrack is different as well and the Playstation 4 version features cinematic cutscene for every stage. A new mode exclusive to Playstation 4 version is the live stream mode in which like other gaming live streams, there may be people trying to deliver some help or cause some disturbance to the player. Of course, there are controversies taking place in live streams like those naughty idiots pulling those criminal level pranks like getting the player or someone else s***ted or something. These kinds of behaviors are really offensive and can land those idiots into trouble like what already happened last year so you'll need some security when planning out your gaming live stream.
Gameplay in Super Stardust HD is like Asteroids and Geometry Wars mixed together. In the original, it's more or less an Asteroids clone but the original has the 3D stages that are kind of like Galaxy Force II or Space Harrier and that version has rendered CGI graphics for both 2D and 3D gameplay. It surely pushes the limits of the later Amiga hardware and there's also the DOS version in existence to the test. Unlike the original version, you get full controls of the ship with two analog sticks and each stage has all phases taking place on each planet with no interruptions. The original version has phases scattered throughout each stage, sort of like Galaga 88 on versions excluding PC-Engine and Game Gear versions. If you want a giant map representing a stage in Super Stardust, that will require warping from one phase to another for a short time. Super Stardust HD removes all those time-wasting elements from the original.
There are other ports of Super Stardust HD such as PSP version, PS Vita version and of course, the PS4 version. Each version has different name, soundtrack and other differences as well.