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Star Guard — an Old-School Platformer Done Right

Posted by Soulskill on from the 39-deaths-i-am-terrible dept.

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.'"

6 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Just watched the video... by Yvan256 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's old-school and then there's too-old-school.

    I'm not one to usually say this, but the graphics really do look dated (what is that, CGA graphics flashback?), as well as the gameplay and sound effects (almost sounds like the simple PC speaker that we got rid of a long time ago, thank you very much).

    This game seems boring at best. And why compile the damn thing for PC and Mac? Why not just embed the damn Flash game into the webpage itself?

    1. Re:Just watched the video... by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If you want to see a good game with simple graphics, look at http://www.canabalt.com/.

      Damn thing only has 6 colors and yet it looks amazing.

      As for being a good game, watching the video sure doesn't makes me want to play it, and I've started playing videogames in the Atari 2006 era so I'm not biased against old-school games (Night Stalker on Intellivision is a good game, for reference).

    2. Re:Just watched the video... by scaryjohn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I haven't tried to play it yet, but I would give two thumbs up to the CGA color scheme if they'd used the CGA palate: #55ff55 instead of #00ff00, et c. As someone who played old timey games on old timey hardware, seeing the VGA palate in retro games or in emulators always throws me off.

      --
      One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
    3. Re:Just watched the video... by mikael · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Perhaps it is the simplicity of the graphics and sound - all those DOS games didn't use more than a handful of commands to interact with the screen (draw points, draw lines, draw circles/eliipses, fill circles/ellipses, paste pixelmap), and the sound command (which directly set the frequency of the speaker).

      You might just find that PC's still have the speaker built in - I found out that when keeping the [Shift] key pressed for more than eight seconds, then there was a Frogger type sound and something called Speed-Keys popped up.

      Take away the Dolby surround sound, the 24-bit HD framebuffer with motion-capture character animation and most games would probably have the same gameplay as these DOS games. Though, there are better Flash games

      Super Mario 63 is a Flash version of the Super Mario platform games.

      Crazy Planets is a missile type game based on the curvature of a planet, rather than a simple grid

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  2. Spelunky by Allicorn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.spelunkyworld.com/

    Utterly unforgiving, cute, fascinating, free, old-school platformer.

    (windows only sadly)

    --
    OMG!!! Ponies!!!
  3. How did this make Slashdot? by richtaur · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not bitching here, I promise: I am legitimately curious. I've played dozens of games like this and I know people who make games like this who would LOVE to get their game on Slashdot.

    So what am I missing? How is this different or unique enough to justify a Slashdot posting? ... Anybody?