When it first came out in 2014, Super Mega Baseball was one of the best baseball games in a long time. It took all the complexities off baseball and distilled them down to their essence, concocting a deep but surprisingly approachable baseball simulation. Hell, it’s the game that taught me …
arcade
Ikaruga is the rare sort of game that comes around once in a generation. It’s famous for its difficulty, even among bullet hell shoot ’em ups—a genre known for being brutal and unforgiving—but it’s so much more than that. It’s not just a game with clever systems and creative level …
Few games carry the legacy that Space Invaders does. It’s easily one of the most influential games ever made, being almost single-handedly responsible for the shoot ’em up genre and arcade leaderboards. Almost anyone who was alive in the golden era of arcade games will have some memory of playing …
It feels like arcade-style racing games have somewhat fallen to the wayside lately, but fans of those delightfully unrealistic takes on motorsport have a couple of new things to look forward to this year: a remaster of the critically-acclaimed Burnout Paradise by Criterion, and Codemasters’ Onrush. Originally released in 2009, Burnout Paradise brought …
Damsel, from Australian indie outfit Screwtape Studios, is a simple game in concept: playing as the eponymous Damsel (who is anything but in distress), you run around short, sharp platformer levels shooting vampires with your trusty shotgun. That’s pretty much the entirety of the game, but it works wonders; Damsel …
It’s been almost 30 years since the original Raiden helped give birth to the modern shoot ’em up. With Raiden V: Director’s Cut, the series finally makes its debut on PlayStation 4. The core ideas haven’t really changed even since the 1990 arcade game, but they don’t need to—the …
Matterfall is the latest example of Housemarque’s mastery of twin-stick shooters, this time combined with platformer mechanics – and it works wonders. Housemarque has earned a reputation as one of the finest developers of twin-stick shooters, and rightfully so. They’ve got this classic genre down to a fine art, making …
A few years ago, I tried a demo of Ikaruga. I liked the concept of the game, and I had fond childhood memories of other shoot ‘em ups like Raptor: Call of the Shadows and TwinBee, so I thought for sure that Ikaruga would be a game I would like. …