LittleBear
says: The second mouse gets the cheese.
28.09.07
AblationX
Courtesy of nenad at Retro Remakes forum… AblationX and a fight against the logo 
Awesome. Via Independent Gamer.
27.09.07
Decobliss
Decobliss is one of those mood games. It lulls you into a trance with its music and visuals, then throws a wave at you filled with enemies and bullets.
It’s a bit different, as you might see from the screen shots. Arrows (or ‘WASD‘) to move, but movement’s on the rails shown. Ignore forward and backward, just concentrate on the circular movement of left and right. Firing is with the mouse, left button for bullets and the right for a laser. Thanks Tim.
26.09.07
Saberella
Saberella is Crimson Knight‘s entry in the SHMUP-DEV Competition 2k7 Round 2. I’d like to compliment him on a solid bit of work, and the inaugeral “Most Improved from Last Contest” award. Arms of Avalon was Crimson Knight‘s previous effort.
The controls are nice and solid and there’s some really nice pixel work here. I haven’t quite figured out the power ups, but it seems one of them, a “spark” acts like a kind of shield. I imagine there are instructions in the forum topic at Shmup-Dev, I’m just too lazy tonight after a long day at a training class.
Tanks a Lot
Tanks a Lot has an official contest release up now. My hat goes off to mice for this effort, I really like it.
It’s played at a slow pace, with a really fitting and somber soundtrack. You drive a tank, and you have infantry support in a great take on the options theme. They follow your movements, though it’s a little hard to predict. You’re responsible for them, though, and you can lose them by having them walk into enemy fire. Thankfully, more will parachute in.
What else? Great graphics and an interesting firing mechanism: ‘X‘ for straight forward shooting, ‘Z‘ and ‘C‘ for the angles, and combinations for everything in between. It also makes nice use of the environment, careful as you might find yourself unable to move out of the way due to trees or buildings. And, it’s written in Java with LWJGL for OpenGL support.
Jetspeed
Jetspeed is a fun little shooter written in Flash. It’s fairly basic, arrows for movement (this means acceleration and breaking with right and left) and ‘space‘ to fire a missile. You need to destroy the tanker trucks, and with each one destroyed you gain missiles and replenish your shields. The thing I like is the pace. It’s fast, it’s a race. You don’t see that in many shmups these days, and it’s nice for a change.
Incidentally, I saw this in the latest Retro Gamer magazine. It was just below a review of Oddbob‘s G-Force, which received a mark of 83%. Well done sir
