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

Re:How did this make Slashdot?

[DNS-and-BIND]

1. Editor needs something to put on the front page, surveys what's in the queue, and decides we haven't had a games story for a while. Poof.

2. Editor gets bribed. As an editor myself, I can certainly say that it works. Sometimes the bribe is shockingly small. I smell bribery all over Slashdot's consistently odd choice of articles. It's like living in 1975 and watching Betty Ford stagger around and not really understanding what's the problem, yet you know something just ain't right.