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:Runs on Linux just fine!

[Yvan256]

If it's really a Flash game then why embed a stupid video on the webpage instead of the game itself?

Spelunky

[Allicorn]

http://www.spelunkyworld.com/

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

(windows only sadly)

Re:Just watched the video...

[Yvan256]

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).

How shocking

[Angst Badger]

yet still entertaining

Shockingly, we played games in the 8-bit era just as obsessively as the current generation plays games in the present day. Still more shockingly, we enjoyed the hell out of them without spending a lot of time thinking about how much better the graphics would be in twenty or thirty years.

This isn't a getoffmylawn post, though I'm sure someone will react that way. The graphics in the current games are pretty impressive; I'm often amazed at how good each new round of games looks. But as a great many gamers who weren't born until well after that 8-bit (or, for that matter, 16-bit) era will readily complain, there are still a lot of genuinely awful but visually impressive games out there. As with software generally, presentation can enhance functionality, but cannot replace it. And, of course, when it comes to games, functionality is enjoyability.

Good games are good games. Better technology can sometimes add to them and sometimes not, if the various attempts to "upgrade" Pac-Man with 3D graphics are any indication. Play the games that are fun, and leave the marketroids to bloviate about their benchmarks.

How did this make Slashdot?

[richtaur]

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?

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.

Re:Just watched the video...

[Yvan256]

IMHO Star Guard wasn't worthy of a Slashdot article and smells more like an ad, even if the game is free.

There's also the fact that if it's a Flash game, why not embed it in the webpage directly? I'm not running random programs from the 'net, and that includes games.

Re:Just watched the video...

[mikael]

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

And yet he kept on playing...

[John Pfeiffer]

Fine. I beat the damn game. Not because I was enjoying it, but because I'd be GOD DAMNED if I didn't beat this damnable game! The first part of the boss fight was BULLSHIT. It took me 60 lives to beat Level 9 on my second try. Fuck that. ARRGH! At least now I can delete it from my hard drive.