Sonic FA is another asian shmup, this one from the curtain fire school of design, with great pixelicious graphics and an absolutely brutal difficulty level. It’s otherwise pretty conventional in design – kill ships to get powerups to upgrade your shot power, blast everything in site whilst avoiding the bullet storm. Fun, if frustrating, and a worthy friday fun link. Since the homepage is in japanese, some clues – use your arrow keys to move, and the z and x keys to fire your guns and missiles. Here’s a direct download link as well. Oh, and windows only, sorry mac and linux folk.

[via]

I finished the latest episode of Halflife 2 this weekend. Overall I’d give it a B. It’s got the same solid Halflife 2 production values and the engine still looks great, and there’s one significant gameplay element added, a gravity gun launched sticky bomb that has to be set off with a pistol to deal with a certain situation. Honestly though beyond that HalfLife 2 is beginning to feel a bit stale. The story is still engaging, and ends in such a way that leaves me wanting to know/play more, but for the most part this pak feels like a rehash, with the same sort of situations we’ve seen in Halflife 2 before, differentiated by being set in new level geometry or featuring a different character or a new weapon. Also I’m starting to get aggravated with a couple of longstanding Source engine bugs – the sound stuttering bug (I mean

In the 80’s, there was the arcade game Wizards of Wor, and the teenagers did say ‘it was very good.’ But in the 90’s the arcades did die off, and the arcade gamers from the 80’s did say unto the lord ‘woe is us, for the youngins do play games of great complexity and less fun!’ And the lord of arcade fun did hear their prayers, and in the 2000’s he caused to be a resurgence of fan made classic arcade game remixes and remakes, and the arcade gamers of the 80’s rejoiced, and did play many, and fun was had. But still, there was no longer a Wizards of Wor, and the arcade fans of the 80’s did wish there would be one. And lo, Dave discovered that there WAS one, and he linked to it in his blog. And there was much rejoicing and blasting of demons with laser blasters by all.

[link courtesy of indygamer, quixotic tone courtesy of my mood. Game for windows only, tiny download, great meticulously crafted pixelicious graphics, difficult to master controls. Check it out]

Admit it – doesn’t this look like fun?

(~3 minutes, footage of various carnage in Crackdown, an Xbox 360 game)

It was. Crackdown was excellent. It’s a 3rd person action game set in a dystopian future city where you’re a genetically altered supercop out to put the smackdown on the gangs that have run amok in the city. The city itself is fantastic – it’s huge, diverse, detailed, populated with tons of people wandering and driving about, and graphically it looks great. The game is free form – aside from some hand holding in the beginning you’re basically free to do as you please, exploring, fighting wandering thugs, and seeking out gangleader hideouts as you see fit. Your skills increase as you use them, so for example in the beginning you can only jump about 10 feet, and by the end you can leap about like a bionic jackrabbit superhero. The core mechanics of running, fighting, shooting, jumping and climbing are really solid and really fun, so much so that even though I’ve solved the game I’ve still been playing it a bit, continuing to explore the nooks and crannies of the huge city. It’s not all perfect – enemy AI is poor, which is especially obvious when you fight the bosses, and the driving is ok but much less compelling than the other gameplay mechanics. Still, the game is a solid, engaging A level game and well worth a look, especially since you can get it dirt cheap – my copy was only $13 shipped from an ebay seller.

It’s also got coop which I haven’t tried yet but which I intend to if I can only manage to convince my buddy Trevor to pick up a copy.