Tag: Asteroids

April 17, 2014 / / Essays

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

Philippians 4:6

I’ve got a penchant for shooters. No, not “first person shooters”, just shooters in the traditional arcade sense. They’re not my favorite genre due to lack of time investment and possibly difficulty, but I enjoy them thoroughly nonetheless. In that sense, I know what works and what doesn’t work in a style that become so insanely specialized, so wonderfully full of depth, that many of its developer stalwarts simply up and vanished from their specificity.

Western studios, of course, don’t often take cues from their Japanese forebears except in the most vague of nostalgia-induced senses. Galak-Z: The Dimensional follows more in the tradition of Asteroids than it does in CAVE’s bullet-hell wheelhouse. With a visual style (cel-shaded, if I had to take a guess) cribbed directly from 1970s anime such as Gundam and Macross, it tries to revive a certain generation of animated cartoons while also providing a unique two-dimensional shooting experience. The game seems structured enough, with missions akin to “episodes” and plenty of wonderful nostalgia-bait. A beautiful game deserves some beautiful systems, we hope!