Star Guard — an Old-School Platformer Done Right

An anonymous reader writes "Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a new game called Star Guard, a Flash-based platformer for Mac and PC that's a throwback to the early days of computer gaming, yet still entertaining. They describe it thus: 'Its greatest strength, to my mind, is throwing out the old-school traditions of difficulty. It does certainly get tricky, requiring the platformer standbys of carefully timed jumps and learning enemy patterns — there's something of a Metroid vibe to it. But you don't get punished for failing to meet one of its challenges — you're just plunged a few feet back to most recent checkpoint, and carry on. Lives are not finite, but the small mound of green pixels that mark your corpses are a maudlin testament to your ineptitude. However, death is useful — I ritually found myself sending in a suicide spaceman, taking out an enemy or a mine so that the path was clear for my next go. ... However, it doesn't leave people who pride themselves on their gaming skill, and demand their games to be hard, out in the cold. At the end of each level, your score alters dramatically depending on how many times you died.'"

Comments

Runs on Linux just fine!

[flajann]

I don't know why they would specify "Mac or PC" with a Flash game. It ran on my Linux system just fine. They had me thinking it wouldn't work under Linux for some reason (and I do know of some Flash apps that crap out under Linux!)

Re:How did this make Slashdot?

[Jesus_666]

Plus, it's not even written that well. The control scheme (which is never explained) makes sense only on QWERTY keyboards and can't be changed and the game occasionally freezes (but that might just be the incredibly buggy "MAC 10,0,32,18" Flash player). The "PC" and "Mac" versions appear to be identical in everything but name and neither is a native binary.

I have no idea why this was considered newsworthy, it's just bad.