After two weeks away, there are a fair number of colourful oddities to pick over today, from side-scrolling RTS games to three-handed cat rescue sims. Luckily, I have a note explaining my absence, and the note reads: I was playing these games.
Swords & Soldiers HD
Developer: Ronimo Games
Format: PC, Mac, PS3
Ronimo’s brilliant reimagining of the RTS made a decent splash when it landed on WiiWare, and a lot of that was down to how well the tiny Utrecht-based studio had rebuilt tricky strategy control schemes for Nintendo’s quirky interface. Now the game has arrived on the PC and Mac, it’s a pleasure to report that the whole thing works even better with a mouse than it does with a Wii remote.
The key to the fun is that the developers have made some ingenious decisions as to where your attention should be focused during the frantic cartoon battles. Units, once created, tend to look after themselves, which leaves you free to handle base upgrades and magic attacks, while the side-scrolling view means that you can take in the entire conflict in a few sweeps of your mouse hand. With online multiplayer, a sharp HD presentation, and three separate campaigns, this is unmissable stuff (it’s also available on PSN with Move support).
Super Crate Box
Developer: Vlambeer
Format: PC and Mac
Vlambeer’s noisy shooter is wonderfully challenging and a squelchy chip-tune pleasure to listen to, but its real genius lies with the balancing, as the boxes you need to collect in order to score will also switch out your current weapon, possibly handing over the brilliantly super-powered revolver, but potentially landing you with the disc gun, its ricocheting ammo ensuring it’s as hazardous as it is effective. Almost everything in your arsenal comes with pros and cons, as it happens, from a devastating laser rifle that takes a long time to charge, to ineffectual dual pistols which allow you to shoot in two directions at once. No matter how well you pick your way through each arena, you’ll never get quite enough time with your favourite tools.
The enemies pouring in from above, meanwhile, present an equally smart challenge, as they’ll drop through the bottom of the screen and re-emerge, enraged, from the top if you don’t get to them fast enough. Super Crate Box is that rare title, then, that keeps you moving, keeps you dying, and yet somehow manages to keep you coming back each time. Slight as it is, it’s already a candidate for my game of the year.
Aah Impossible Rescue
Developer: Aah Games
Format: XBLIG
A stiff reminder that astonishingly difficult games used to be the rule rather than the exception, Aah Games’ XBLIG debut tasks you with something that most players are likely to find implausibly challenging: simultaneously steer three separate cats through three separate channels – often moving at separate speeds – and get them all to the finish line without squashing them against something nasty.
Just charming enough to keep you battling past the frustration, Impossible Rescue earns its right to abuse you through elegant level design and very simple controls. It helps that waiting at the end of it all is something else that used to be the rule rather than the exception, too: a genuine sense of having mastered something.