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Impressions: Invisigun Heroes (PAX South 2016-Build)

PAX has always been a place for finding high-grade indie-games worthy of talking about. The games are generally a mix of novel, innovative and fun with some prospect of them being close to completion. This year at PAX South 2016, I was able to wade through the dozens of independent games there and found a new game that has a good mixture of all three.

InvisigunHeroes_lightBG_2x

 

 

Invisigun Heroes is a mix of Bomberman and Hide-and-Seek. Give Bomberman a gun, make it 4-players and make all players invisible and you can immediately understand the game and easily imagine how chaotic things can get.

Start

You’re not invisible all of the time and you aren’t impossible to be spotted at all times. Bump into a tree, people know where you are (kind of).

hit-wall

Walk onto a puddle of water and you leave a ripple behind, people know where you are (more than kind of, deadman).

invisigun_gameplayB

But if you try to capitalize on knowing where someone may be, you have to shoot your weapon thus making yourself visible and easy to spot.

shoot-visible

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Let’s Talk About – Chunithm 

chunithm-banner

Chunithm – Site

Songlist

Traveling to Japan is always interesting, in particular Tokyo. The city is always busy from the waking hours till the trains shut down at midnight,, the neon lights and smell of food from a small ten-person restaurant can be sensed from blocks away, and there is always something new to find in the city, whether you’re visiting for a only a week or have lived there your entire life. It’s an intoxicating display and makes it impossible to not go exploring for something new, especially to International eyes.

Akihabara

And in Tokyo you can find a slew of Video Arcades, particularly in Akihabara, and in these arcades you can find a war for floor space between fighting games, the newly established virtual card games, and a new breed of music games fighting for audible space of each floor.

And then I came across this machine.

machine1

Chunithm.

I didn’t think much of it at first. There were a few new music games to try that aren’t really seen in the US. Groove Coaster, REV, and the few other music games that I found in the arcade are rare to see, so I wanted to get my hands on them at least once.

What a silly name, Chunithm.

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Impressions – Just Shapes and Beats – PAX Prime 2015

Just Shapes and Beats

Music games are strange. They’re strange in that there is something about the game that you can sync up with to make the game more predictable, something that’s rhythmic, something on beat. When you play the game well because you’re completely in-sync with the music there’s a strange body-extension sensation that takes over, but only for the time you feel in-time with the music.

That means that music games typically went one of a few ways. You make finding that synchronicity the main point of the game and pushing the limit of that synchronicity by pushing your dexterity and stamina, ala Rock Band. Maybe you make the music a byproduct of the player’s actions so those actions create new music on every playthrough, e.g. Sound Shapes or Everyday Shooter. Maybe you have the music be the cue for onscreen action and movement, e.g. Donkey Kong Country Returns and Axiom Verge.

Just Shapes and Beats is probably closest to the last of these, onscreen cues except that cues aren’t the easiest to judge and time.

just-shapes-and-beats-boss-1

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Impressions: Ultimate Chicken Horse – PAX Prime 2015

Ultimate Chicken Horse

Original Kickstarter

There’s a lot of ways to ruin friendships when playing a game. Games like Mario Party and Nintendoland have you building temporary alliances and never-forgotten rivalries from past betrayals. Others like Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros relying solely on yourself for victory with the randomness of items to keep things interesting and forcing you to be globally aware but you still feel the anguist when victory is snatched from your grasps by a well-timed red-shell or a lucky pokeball grab.

It’s weird to find a party game that doesn’t have you building a hatred for the people that you’re with over time, but Ultimate Chicken Horse was definitely on its way there.

ultimate-chicken-horse

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Pre-Impressions: PAX Prime 2015 Indie MegaBooth Part 1

This isn’t a post about what I hit during PAX, since at the time of writing this PAX Prime 2015 hasn’t even happened yet. This is a preview of games that has piqued my interested and am hoping to get my hands on it for a playthrough.

For those that don’t know, Indie MegaBooth is a section of PAX specifically carved out for the Indie developers with something innovative, stylish or fun to get some exposure and hands on the controllers.

There are a lot of great looking games on the list, and while I’m only going to talk about a handful of them I still encourage others to take a look at the indie megabooth site and give a few of them a try or to find me and the indie megabooth developers at the booth during PAX and spend a few minutes finding hidden gems waiting in smaller lines than the over publicized 2 hour linecon that you’ll find in the rest of the showroom floor. Some of these games are already available on Steam and other systems so you can even check them out now.

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Let’s Talk About: (Zen and the art of) Absolute Drift

sumi-e 2

Have you ever seen a Sumi-e painting before? There’s a distinct elegance to looking at a Sumi-e painting because of its minimalism. The use of a single color (black). The confidence in their brushstroke that this line is exactly how I want to look or even the ability to adjust when the stroke came out wrong. Being able to visualize the mystic beauty of the world with only greyed silhouettes. Able to use the void of the whitespace to your advantage, to give more meaning to the color on the page, instead of requiring color to fill all of the canvas.

sumi-e 1

This is probably why I picked up Absolute Drift in the first place.

Absolute Drift - Intro

 

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Impressions: Might No 9 – E3 2015, New Mechanics and Forcing Better Pattern Mastery

Might No 9

Release: Sept 15, 2015

Might no 9 - Splash

Might No 9, the game where Megaman started to rebel against Capcom, the company that began to neglect the robot, so much that he decided to get cosmetic-enhancements done to his mechanic body and embody the 90s cool kid look in our post-3D world.

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Impressions: Tom Clancy’s The Division – E3 2015

Release: 2016(?)

Tom Clancy’s The (Troll Hard) Division puts you with a group of 3 post-apocalyptic sleeper agents in the midst of a viral epidemic killing off the US population and you have the single goal of looting every player and NPC that you come into contact with. It doesn’t even matter if they were situational allies or members of your own party, if they have a gun that you like, you can shank a fool and take it off of their body. What’s a dead body going to do to protest? Ragdoll in anger? At least, that would be what the E3 demo would lead me to believe that this game is going to play out.

The Open-world cooperative shooter-genre is definitely trying to explore new directions since Borderlands made its debut a few years ago for the closed party format and Destiny released last year as the drop-in drop-out open party format. Troll Hard has both a drop-in-drop out system where parties are automatically dropped into random servers with other random groups already in them but this is the first with a betrayal system that works contains both inter-party and intra-party mechanics.

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Impressions: Cuphead – E3 2015

Cuphead

Platform: Xbox-one (E3 2015 Build)

Release Date: 2016 (Xbox One, Steam)

E3 - Cuphead

Like the 1920s, 30s, and 40s cartoons that the game emulates, Cuphead is an expression of what fun can mean without all of this newfangled futurism. The game is always rhythmic, bouncing to its own beat to keep up the liveliness that it tries to portray, but always extra expressive thanks to the big eyes and big head making it unnecessary to need nuanced, subjective feelings but instantly knowing the anger or anguish from having every possible feature, from the eyes to the hands to the body language shouting out their current state of being.

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