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Gamasutra's Quantum Leap Awards: Most Important Games, 2006 Honorable Mentions (Continued)
Taken individually, few of Nintendo’s variously-developed titles in the Bit Generations series offered anything truly mechanically groundbreaking, deeply rooted in casual color-match puzzling (the Cornelius sound-designed Coloris and lazy jazz-driven Dialhex) and Pong variations (Boundish) as they might have been, but as a whole the campaign was a remarkable one, especially coming from such a relatively traditionalist publisher. Intended as a boutique series meant to showcase the fashionable handheld future the GameBoy Micro should have inspired (though largely failing to drive hardware sales, let alone sales of the games themselves), each of the seven starkly minimalist but highly stylized games offered something unique. From its most ambitious, Q-Games’ awesomely obscure traffic-directing puzzler Digidrive, to its most challenging, Skip’s visuals-optional audio exploration game Soundvoyager, the series was a landmark one for art-house gaming, rivaling even Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Q Entertainment’s finest. Brandon Boyer, News Editor, Gamasutra
Capcom’s splatterfest Dead Rising took the sandbox genre and threw in some zombies and a mess of weird weapons and clothes. Not exactly a quantum leap, but certainly a good idea. Adding tons of ways to smite your foes, and the ability to accumulate a crew of idiot survivors (try commanding five of them to move to any given area, and watch them fight to be on that exact pixel), as well as vehicles and cheesy dialog, all inside a shopping mall with big-breasted homeland security agents…well it was a stroke of B-movie genius, if you believe it was all intentional. Dead Rising is enjoyable more for its camp and visceral fun than its serious themes or deep story, but isn’t that what (at least some) videogames are meant to be about? Sometimes it’s good to stop taking ourselves so seriously – without letting gameplay fall by the wayside either. Brandon Sheffield, Features Editor, Game Developer magazine
More of my not-actually-free-time time since August has been wasted on Hizoka T Ohkuba’s freeware shooter Ray Hound than on any other distraction. I’m a sucker for shoot ‘em ups – especially Ohkuba’s previous effort, the exasperatingly addictive Warning Forever – and while Ray Hound isn’t as traditional in its gameplay, it’s no less enjoyable. It’s simply a matter of reflecting lasers shot at you by turrets by “whipping” them around your ship using the mouse, and the fact that it’s so simple to pick up and play at any time means that it is, effectively, sitting on my PC desktop like some sort of horrible temptress. It takes a little while to get going to the sort of manic pace that really gets the blood pumping, but once it does – that’s when it hooks its claws in. It’s not quite in its final state, but once it is I can’t help but feel that it would make a pretty damn good portable game too, or at least a nice little downloadable from one of the console’s online stores. Hmm? Alistair Wallis, Writer, Gamasutra |
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