| paleface [sys=PS3; cat=Shooter_4way; reg=NA] |
| | | Dual-stick downloadable shooter (left stick moves, right stick shoots) with abstract graphics and an odd sort of synthetic guitar soundtrack. I think it's supposed to be a "synesthesia" type of thing that was suddenly hip when Rez (see entry 750) made the term popular--you know, where the action is supposed to generate/flow with the sounds and colors to produce some kind of harmonious blend of game and art or whatever. That's never quite worked for me like all the buzzwords make it out, and it certainly doesn't work here because a) the action is stodgy and b) the music is bad.
The color cycling geometric backgrounds are kind of trippy, but often settle for yicky middle values that aren't exactly pretty. Bullets fired by foes are pretty easy to make out, which is nice in a shooter, and your "ship" has a small hit box, with is also nice, but the feeling of movement is very flat--your vehicle has no sense of movement or weight, it simply goes from one spot to another with all the momentum of an inert lump--and there's no feedback at all from shooting: no sound, and usually no visible effect on the target except for its health bar going down slowly. So you're just kind of sitting there holding a silent hose on static targets until they go away, then you go on to the next one and do the same. This continues until the "song" ends--just time--and the the next stage begins.
Yay. Each stage is supposed to have a different schtick in terms of how the enemies can be chained for points (the first, and maybe the best that I've seen--the most dynamic, anyway--has flotillas of things drifting along, and bombs drifting with them that you shoot to explode in the flotillas for chains, just like hmm EVERY Extend Extra (see entry 1194), gee), how they progress in their attacks, what they look like, and so forth, and this is so, but the dead feeling of the game is still there, and the horrible, horrible jangling "music" only grows more and more aggravating. |
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| | | Download added: 03transition.jpg (19261 bytes)
"Color transition in the background. Feel the magic."
Oh, the game does run at up to 1080p, which I guess is nice, so you can see all the little flat/cell-shaded thingies drifting around real sharp. |
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