Be Excellent To Each Other

Sly bastards kept this one rather quiet - funnily enough SI:E is about the only vert shooter I've found to match up to the alphas of Gridrunner +++ since I played them, now both titles are looking set to bury some of the more unpleasant stuff around the Space Giraffe release bother.

http://www.gamershell.com/news_61948.html

Might have to get down to Carmarthenshire this weekend then.

This has been covered in the XBLA Thread-oh, in case you missed it.

It has also been covered on my site

http://www.snappygamer.com/2008/10/09/s ... -xbox-360/

But it definitely deserves a thread of its own. Great news!

Indeed, and I'll say the same thing here.

I hope the fuckers have learnt that you should be able to hold a fire button down this time.

Surely autofire defeats the purpse of most of the score mechanics? The idea was to take out patterns and colours, without hitting anything in between, I'd have thought that was a pretty hard thing to do if you're spamming fire.

I can still take my hand off the button.

'zactly!

Yeah, spamming fire is the last thing you want to be doing in the game..

The points scheme is all about knocking out lines, and rows, and specific colors.
If it autofired, then you would just be cursing everytime you held shoot a fraction of a second to long and popped off another shot wrecking your combo.

That or the rate of fire for holding down would be so slow that you would be tapping anyway.

Totally getting this. Again.

The mechanics of the game remain as they were before, Llamasoft are just contributing the trippiness, as the backgrounds from the DS version wouldn't have worked in 1080p or whatever.

Gridrunner +++ will probably have autofiring when it comes out, but that's a gameplay mechanic itself, how and where you fire is important as opposed to when. You certainly can't lose anything from firing all the time and there's always something to fire at, always something you can hit. Some will complain but they have a good many regular shooters on XBLA for that sort of thing. While I'm of the opinion that Llamasoft tread a difficult line between popular appeal and retro values and don't always get things right I'm confident that these two releases will be less 'Marmite' and more 'Geometry Wars'.

Also, there will be no cows in Space Invaders: Extreme.

Which would be my fault.

Whereas having aching hands because of lazy programming is not.

Aching hands because you are playing the game how it isn't designed to be played.

I would rather not accidentally fuck up my combo just so that people who aren't playing the game properly don't get cramp in their hands.

I turned off the backgrounds on the DS version, and I think I may do it again.

Without wanting to sound like you could, you know, have it an option in the menu?

Indeed, And after watching this montage video of the XBLA stuff I do infact remember that you did have to spam teh fire button with the bosses, so duds has a point.

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/21949

Exactly, fuck the combos, I have enough trouble staying ALIVE.

Want hard.

I found spamming fire to be the quickest way to die though. Hitting 3 blue invaders, for the beam weapong (which you can hold down) is your best bet. Then (holding L to deactivate your special, if needed) hitting three red or green, to get bomb or wide shot when you get reflection invaders, is the best way to stay alive. Anytime I have to resort to rapidly firing the normal gun I'm pretty close to death.

But you do have to spam you piddly gun on a number of the bosses, which is tedious, I'll give you that.

Eeeek, can't wait for this, but I've just realised that they haven't given it a release date. I hope it isn't for summer of arcade 2009 that would suck...

Well, the visualiser side is probably just a case of patching an up-to-date build of Neon into the code, so I doubt Llamasoft's inclusion is going to push the release date forward from whatever it was. I'm under an NDA which I think covers all Neon work beyond what you get in the 360 dash, so I'm not saying anything beyond what is already known about post-Dash/SG Neon, but Llamasoft should be able to build a nice background for each level in the game and the writers chuck them in.

I've only spoken briefly to Jeff about the project, and his sole comment was that Space Invaders have square horns. I'm inclined to agree with him.

Summer '09 on one level is a bit of a wait for an announced Live game, however if it means these sort of games get a higher level of exposure due to the 'themed season' approach I'm happy for it to wait to get in. And if M$ are paying devs to hold a game back for it that can only encourage the developers to re-invest in Live, making it better value for the customer.

I'm also glad the worse-reviewed games are being given a stay of execution due to the new front-end, having payed out for the likes of Defender and Gauntlet, I'm appreciative of the fact that there's a number of players out there who genuinely want the convenience/gamer points/live scoreboards on games they can play on other systems for free. Things like Asteroids, which was due to go, are someone's favourite thing on the system, no reason why others should lose that opportunity just because the shop interface is underpowered.