The first thing that strikes you is the beautiful and stylish old school graphics. The screen, curved like an old cathode ray tube, reminded me of Fallout which I’ve been playing a lot. The colours are bright day glow neons and there are plenty of fast moving sprites to confuse you. Throw in a funky soundtrack by High Frequency Bandwidth and SideScroller really does scream arcade classic.

There’s not too much to think about in a game like this; it’s really down to reactions rather than major strategy. You’ve three choices of weapons, standard guns, lasers and then bombs with the usual sort of upgrades to improve the weapons, extra life and a temporary shield. Flicking between the weapons is as quick as pushing a button but you have to cycle through them which can be awkward if you are using lasers but need guns. Occasionally you need the other weapons, but I found it far easier to concentrate on using the machine guns and making sure you get all the power ups.

Level design is pretty nice but not going to win any awards. Carrying over from other PixelJunk games there are liquids in various parts of the game. These take the form of water, fire, acids, and some others. All bar one do damage to you in different ways. Since they are liquids, they tend to flow up or down following gravity and the level layout as you’d expect. Fire erupts, water drains down and so forth. The most important is water since this can help heal the ship from damage you’ve taken. Thing is, it actually took me a while to realize what these various things did. Since the game is so fast paced I spent a few levels rushing through the water as I thought I might take damage from it.

I tried the initial three different difficulty levels and even the easiest was very hard. The fourth difficulty level is called Brutal and if you really want to go that way you’ll need to finish the game on hard level first. While playing there are a large amount of check points and even if you run out of lives you can continue indefinitely. Down side of that is, if you run out of lives and restart at a check point you’ve lost any weapon upgrades you had. Now a trick I used was to just push as fast as possible through to those check points, I skipped killing a lot of things just to get there.

By the time I managed to clear the first stage I had practically destroyed my teeth in stress. The game is challenging, but for me a lot of that was more due to zoning out while staring at the screen. There’s so much going on and with the neon colour palette it can make it pretty hard to keep track of all the bullets flying around. Combine in the little collectibles and sometimes you fly straight into a bullet just because you think it’s supposed to be collected.

PixelJunk SideScroller is pretty great fun for the price. Just don’t expect to fly through in one go. Here watch a highlight video of my attempt at a level and laugh!

Pixel Junk SideScroller is available now from the PSN Store.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

The first gameplay video has appeared for Valve Software’s brand new Counter-strike game. The game will also be playable at next month’s Eurogamer Expo.

R-Type:

IREM’s classic side-scrolling shooter R-Type is coming to Android devices on the 12th September 2011 from DotEmu. You control your R-9 Arrowhead ship via a touchscreen interface just like on the iOS versions of the game. What more is there to say, it’s R-Type.

Legend Of Grimrock

Be still my beating heart! Legend of Grimlock is a dungeon crawler in the spirit of the legendary Dungeon Master game. Currently in development for PC, iOS and Mac by Finish developer Almost Human Games, the game is due for release later on this year. After watching the video, I’m just a little bit excited as Dungeon Master and its sequel Chaos Strikes Back are my favourite games ever. (via RPS)

TIKIPODltd also gave me a brilliant Black Tiger mug as a birthday present a few years ago which I use to hold my daily cuppa. It’s a lovely looking mug :-)

Time to go and immerse yourself in a bit of gaming history and check out Black Tiger.

For those of you that are interested, you can keep track of the Black Tiger for M.A.M.E. world record highscore.

Black Tiger is available now for 800 Wii points on the Nintendo Wii.

This version of R-Type includes all 8 levels from the arcade version and 3 different control methods:

• Touch (self explanatory really, control your ship with your fingers, or thumb)
• Tilt (move your ship by tilting the device)
• Coin-op (on screen virtual d-pad with 2 buttons)

There are also 2 difficulty levels, normal and insane. You unlock the insane difficulty option when you’ve completed the game on normal. Given that I’ve never got further than level 5 on R-Type, I can’t see this happening for me any time soon.

Fortunately for us mere mortals there is an unlimited mode. This grants you unlimited lives but at a cost of a 1000 points a life. Make no mistake this version of R-Type is tough, perhaps tougher than ever with the new touch screen controls, especially for those of us who have grow-up playing R-Type in the arcades back in the 80′s.

Screenshots:

Hydorah is a mash up of all the classic shooters you can remember. R-Type, Gradius, X-multiply, Salimander, X-Out and Z-Out to name but a few. It looks awesome, has brilliant music and is free.

There are 16 levels to complete and lots of different weapons to play with. Make no mistake Hydorah is one tough game and you will find yourself playing the game again and again to get past the next level.

You can download Hydorah from filefront. It is just over 82mb in size. Sadly, Locomalito’s website is down at the moment, so you can’t get to see what else he’s up to :-(

Also there are some nice write ups of Hydorah and interviews with Locomalito himself at justonemoregame and Indiegames.

Well, worry no more. Thanks to this tread on the NeoGAF forums (also contains lots of other premium theme pictures) you can see what it looks like before you buy. Microsoft clearly doesn’t want to show you what you’re buying with these themes as there is no preview. Rubbish. Anyway, on with the pictures:

Thanks to Rocca on NeoGAF for taking the above screenshots.

R-Type Dimensions is available now on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 Microsoft Points

So what do you get for your MS points:

• R-Type I and II
• Classic game mode – Yay. Play them just how IREM designed them to be
• 3D and 2D graphics – You can flip between the 2 modes on demand
• Single or co-op play – For the first time ever, play R-Type with a friend!
• Infinite game mode – Claims to assure game completion regardless of how useless you are
• Statistics tracking – Track your vital stats (i.e. see how many times you died – probably)
• 2 gamer pictures – Available to all, no skill necessary (according to the press release)

Time for some nice screenshots:

R-Type Dimensions will be available on the 4th Feb 09 for 1200 MS Points on XBLA only for the Xbox 360

Some features of R-Type Command:

• Intense strategy gameplay – Almost 100 different units to command
• Control the Bydo forces – Hehe, time to attack Earth!
• Head-to-head local multiplayer – One-on-one strategy battle time

Look out for my review when the US version drops through my letterbox in May. In the meantime you can gaze lovingly at the screenshot below. Ooooh, so pretty.

Omega 5 certainly looks nice with it’s high-def visuals. It promises to be quite tough too with the ultra-challenging “++ Mode”, where you’re only allowed one hit. You can also play with a friend, but only from the comfort of your living/bed room. Shame. Online co-op would have been quite fun.

It’s out now on Xbox Live Arcade, and costs 800 Microsoft points. Which I will buy using a pre-paid points card since I’m currently removing my card details from Xbox Live.

Yep indeedy, R-type is a comin’ to the Wii (via virtual console) – nice.

R-TYPE – Woooo!!!

Shame this site won’t allow background images :( , could really do with a scrolling starfield right now.