But it would be a shame to let the game’s music be swept under the rug. Instead, grab Lifeformed’s original Dustforce score, Fastfall. If you purchase the whole soundtrack (for $3.99), you’ll also get three additional bonus tracks. Even if you haven’t tried the game yet, it’s a nice, relaxing album of mellow electronica that’s easy to enjoy. You can hear a sample of the game’s music in the trailer below.

Buy the Soundtrack: Bandcamp

Gundemonium Collection may be over a year old, but it just released on Steam with a few new features. This package of doujin shmups contains Gundemonium Recollection, its sequel GundeadliGne, and their vastly different prequel Hitogata Happa.

The most obvious changes in the Steam version are the remixed soundtracks. They’re quite a step up from the originals thanks to the talent of DM Ashura and Woofle (Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania IIDX). You’ll also find a new online co-op mode for GundeadliGne allowing you to play with your Steam friends.

But I’m sure many out there haven’t had a chance to check out these games in the first place since they are a niche within a niche.

Both Gundemonium Recollection and Gundeadline are horizontal shooters with unusually large sprites. This allows for a lot of personality to be put into each character and enemy design. They often approach Cute ‘em Up territory with their goofy pumpkin enemies, Parodius-like women in bunny suits, and other equally wacky things. Of course, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets cut in half.

"Bullets abound in Gundemonium Recollection."

The large sprites also go hand in hand with the friction system that rewards players for coming in close contact with bullets. The small hit box allows you to squeeze through unbelievably tight spaces while having the rest of your sprite take advantage of this system.

Bombs are pretty standard fare in Gundemonium Recollection. There are a few different variations depending on your character and you’ll acquire more by picking up powerups. GundeadliGne takes a far more interesting approach. A variety of selectable “Matrix Orders” each provide you with a unique bomb function and reload time. Bombs no longer have to be collected and instead must be recharged. This allows you to choose settings that match your play style whether you want weak attacks that recharge fast, strong or wide area attacks that recharge slowly, or anything in between.

GundeadliGne also introduces the “Flip Turn” system, allowing you to shoot in either direction similar to Capcom’s Section Z. Because of this, enemies come from all directions instead of just the right, and bosses tend to move around much more as well. It gives the whole game a different feel than its predecessor and provides a fresh change of pace.

Expect bullet patterns to get crazy. Not only will you be dodging spiraling waves of shots, you’ll also find yourself navigating through tunnels and segmented tracks made of bullets. Luckily, certain secondary weapons can help slow things down and make dodging more manageable.

"Hitogata Happa is full of very interesting ideas."

The black sheep of the collection (though not in a negative sense) is Hitogata Happa. Unlike the other games, Hitogata Happa is a vertical shooter with wildly different mechanics. Unfortunately, these mechanics are not immediately obvious without consulting the game’s manual (which I highly recommend doing). I went from not “getting it”, and practically ignoring it, to finding it the most fun and interesting game in the group.

Many enemies have a “Zone of Control” that acts as sort of an inverse to the friction system of Recollection. Flying within this visible circle around the enemy will cause all bullets that pass through it to slow down and also turn them into gems when the enemy is defeated. It can be dangerous, but often reaps huge rewards.

These gems can be spent on “dolls” which are essentially the different characters you control. There are quite a few different dolls to choose from and each one feels drastically different thanks to a unique variety of weapons, special abilities, and movement speeds. But you can only buy twelve of a single doll and the more you buy, the more the price of that particular doll will rise, encouraging you to spread your money across a variety of dolls. Weapons include focused laser beams, multidirectional drills, a Raiden-esque curving laser, homing missiles, and even swords to name a few.

If you’re wondering how the game retains its difficulty while allowing you to purchase so many lives, it is thanks to Hitogata Happa‘s very unconventional bomb system. Rather than pressing a button to use a bomb, you instead must fly your doll directly into an enemy. This will kill the doll in question, but also explode causing massive damage which is crucial to winning boss battles.

But you can’t just use this attack any time. You’ll have to first let the “Flow Charge” gauge fill completely over time. This can cause some frustrating moments as I often found myself dying the second before the gauge was full. But when you completely destroy an entire arm of a boss by flying into it, it’s extremely satisfying.

In the first level, you will be forced to use the cheapest doll the game has to offer. It’s fairly slow, but has the special ability of slowing down time at the cost of your mana gauge. It can be easy to get turned off by the game when only experiencing the first level, since much of what makes Hitogata Happa great is what’s introduced after it. And when you aren’t intimately familiar with the game’s mechanics, that first level can be a doozy. But persistence is key as you’ll soon find the unique twists on the shmup genre that the game offers as you progress.

I often found I had to abandon everything I learned in shmup school while fighting the bosses of Hitogata Happa. Aside from rewarding you for charging into the enemy, the bosses themselves are usually rather unique. One made use of several searchlights and fired an especially deadly cannon whenever they spotted me. Another inserted a brain into one of three shells, then shuffled them around. I was forced to keep track of all this while simultaneously dodging bullets in order to shoot the correct enemy.

Bosses also have a time limit. When it runs out, they enter “Error Mode” and spew bullets everywhere. Dying at all during this will cause you to lose regardless of whether or not you have any remaining dolls. This is why bombs are especially important since they allow you to take out the boss before this happens.

Gundemonium Collection is worth checking out for the unique gameplay of Hitogata Happa alone.  Luckily, both Gundemonium Recollection and GundeadliGne are no slouches either.

This review is based on the Steam version of Gundemonium Collection provided to the reviewer by Rockin’ Android.

You know that moment in gaming where you’re no longer making conscious decisions and instead find yourself relying on pure, razor fast instinct? This is how I felt for almost the entirety of the time I spent with SkyDrift. Much like the fantastic Split/Second, SkyDrift‘s brand of racing puts you on the verge of death constantly, and everytime you manage to narrowly escape certain doom at the hands of the track’s terrain or your opponent’s weapons it feels like a miracle.

It’s amazing how much the concept of flight changes how a racing game plays. The added verticality of racing in an airplane instead of a car allows for a sense of freedom that really makes every race play out differently. This is also helped by some really superb track design. There aren’t a ton of tracks, but the ones that are there are filled to the brim with branching pathways, a ton of variety, and plenty of extra dangerous obstacles that reward players willing to take risks.

The closer you fly to the ground and walls, the more you will fill up your boost gauge. Every minute you cheat death is one that will make you faster. Sometimes it’s easier to fly above or around archways or avoid a narrow slit in a rock face, but if you can survive the danger it can be your ticket to a shorter path, a sweet power-up, or simply a proximity-based boost reward.

Each track sets itself apart by having you fly through anything from the wreckage of an old boat to the lava flow of an active volcano. And since each track has that extra dimension that flight adds, the reverse versions feel drastically different. There’s also a great sense of openness not unlike the underappreciated Excite Truck (but with a bit more focus).

Weapons in racing games must be handled delicately in order to retain balance and fun. Thankfully, SkyDrift hits the nail on the head. Icons clearly indicate which power-up you’ll receive so you can grab what’s best suited for the situation. Each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses without any of them becoming the “I win” button. Even homing missiles aren’t a guaranteed hit due to their straight flight paths. Sure, they will follow their target, but they can’t distinguish between the terrain. Steer your plane behind the other side of a rock mass and you’ll be safely out of the city limits of Explosion Town.

Most importantly, re-spawning is extremely quick. There’s nothing worse than waiting as a Lakitu slowly fishes a go-kart out of a lake. SkyDrift avoids this problem by never letting you have enough downtime to break the flow of the lightning fast gameplay while still disadvantaging you enough to motivate your survival.

If you have a power-up you don’t need, you can sacrifice it for a bit of boost. How much you get will actually be determined by how far back you are to help you play catchup when you’re doing especially poorly. So why even use weapons? Aside from slowing down your opponents, killing them also increases your boost gauge and does so often to a much greater extent than absorbing a power-up would. Killing sprees always let you end in boosting sprees.

Each weapon has a more powerful version if you pick it up twice. You can also hold two different weapons at a time and cycle through them. This all adds up to a lot of different ways to tackle each situation you find yourself in. Will you use your EMP shockwave to take down the surrounding planes or to counter a missile the moment before it hits? You might find the answer is “neither” as you quickly realize there’s a mine to destroy that’s blocking your favorite, secret path.

Not every race features weapons. A small handful of races in the campaign use rings instead. Flying through rings while racing other planes might not sound terribly exciting on paper, but when each one ramps up your speed at an exponential rate reminiscent of Wipeout‘s Zone Mode, it’s one of the most adrenaline pumping experiences in the game (especially when you break the sound barrier).

While playing SkyDrift, I felt like I was transported back to a time when arcade racers were king. That’s not to say the game feels dated (it doesn’t), but I could just see myself in some sort of crazy, plane-shaped contraption of a cabinet, shooting down enemy planes as the whole thing swivels back and forth. The fittingly rocking music and bright, colorful visuals certainly didn’t hurt that feeling.

SkyDrift is an absolute blast. It’s a fresh spin on the weapons-based racing genre that manages to bombard you with explosions and exciting close calls while retaining a sense of coherency and balance. The dual-stick controls take a little getting use to, but you’ll be glad you put forth the effort. Once it clicks, it’s a hard game to put down.

This review is based on the PSN version of SkyDrift provided to the reviewer by Digital Reality.

How many airplane racing games can you think of off the top of your head? Any? Without resorting to Google, all I could come up with was one third of Diddy Kong Racing. This is exactly why I was instantly fascinated by Digital Reality’s SkyDrift. It’s in a sub-genre that’s rarely explored.

You could call it “Mario Kart in the sky”, but that really isn’t fair to the game. SkyDrift may be a weapons-based racer, but it’s far more deliberate and skill-based than any racing I’ve ever done in the Mushroom Kingdom. The fact that you need a second analogue stick to control your plane’s knife position is proof enough that the game is deeper than some of its contemporaries.

Using both sticks doesn’t just make you better, the hairpin turns throughout the cavernous tracks make adjusting the angle of your plane absolutely vital. This is especially true when making quick decisions. This comes up often as the tracks have plenty of branching paths to explore.

Some of the paths will help you shave some time off your lap, while others can be a great source of weapon drops. In my time with the demo, I traveled through valleys, caves, icy waters, and the occasional man-made structure as I shot at my opponents to slow them down.

Flying dangerously is actually rewarded. The more you hug the ground and walls (without crashing), the more you can fill your boost meter. It’s up to you whether to risk it all in order to gain the extra boost you need to overtake your opponent.

Weapon drops are not randomized. Instead, they have clearly marked symbols similar to Blur, so you can actually form strategies and grab the specific power-ups that will be useful to your cause. There are six power-ups in all including missiles, EMP, mines, machine guns, shields, and health refills.

You can hold a few different ones at once and cycle through them. Picking up the same power-up twice will actually change it into a stronger version. Or you can choose to get rid of it altogether by converting it into boost power, further expanding your options.

Each of the eight planes has their own strengths and weaknesses along with a variety of skins to change up the look. Eight is also the number of players in a race, both in single player and online multiplayer.

As a sucker for unconventional racing games, I found myself really enjoying what I played of SkyDrift. Moving in all directions certainly adds a lot more ways to cut lap times than being stuck on a road, and the many branching paths of each track kept them very interesting. I look forward to checking the full version out when it releases this summer.

“We need a better word than video game.”

This is a statement I’ve heard a lot in the last few years. With the expansion of the medium, many have felt that the term unfairly describes certain forms of interactive entertainment. While I don’t necessarily agree, Trauma is the type of game that sparks this kind of discussion.

In Trauma, you explore the dreams of a young woman who was recently hospitalized after being in a car accident. There are four dreams to explore that make up the entirety of the game.

Let me just get this out of the way right now. Trauma can be completed in about fifteen minutes. In fact, I likely completed the first level in about a minute. But that doesn’t mean you will have explored all that the game has to offer in that time.

The first thing you’ll notice in Trauma is its unique visual style. Navigating the dreams is done through photographs. As you click around the environment, different photos will be displayed, giving you the illusion that you’re moving through the environment. You can also draw various lines with the mouse to quickly turn around.

It’s a bit similar, in perspective at least, to Myst. But unlike Myst, you won’t be wracking your brain trying to solve puzzles. The hardest part of Trauma is finding everywhere there is to go, due to the strange way you navigate the dreams. Since some locations require you to make use of the line-drawing controls instead of clicking on what’s visible, it can be easy to miss an explorable section.

As you move through the dreams, the woman narrates. But she never bogs you down with very much dialogue. Her words are few, but they’re usually interesting. She speaks both of the dreams and of her life. The latter is triggered by finding photos strewn about the dreams.

The most surreal moments come in the elements that mix in CG, usually when ending a dream. A building peeling like a banana, a wall shrinking down a drain. These are moments that really shine. If only there weren’t so few of them.

Completing the stages with their true ending will grant you a brief scene in the hospital. There are also a few alternate endings to the dreams, but they don’t give you any more hospital scenes. Collecting photographs within each stage would be great, but many of them are simply basic controls (reused on every stage) or unnecessary hints for alternate endings in other stages. Only a small portion of the collectable photos lead to a brief but interesting look into the life of the woman.

Trauma is a very minimalist game. There’s not much there, but it’s certainly compelling. Due to the game’s brevity the downloadable version is a tough sell, but luckily you can play a free, in-browser version that’s almost identical.

This review is based on the downloadable version of Trauma provided by its creator Krystian Majewski. Trauma can be purchased through Steam or played in-browser at TruamaGame.com.

At 99cents, the pack will be a welcome addition to Magicka’s frantic spell casting action. This is the first paid DLC for the game (the first pack was part of a free update), and according to the game’s publisher, more is on the way.

"Poorly-Photoshopped Representation"

If you could put your ear to the tubes that make up this internet thing, you would hear thousands of people talking about digital distribution. There is no question that digital distribution is the future. You can already download your favorite songs, books, movies, and thousands of games. In the future, there might not even be discs or cartridges. Everything will just download out of the ether onto some crazy futuristic device.

I am a Steam weekend deal addict. My PSP memory sticks are full of PSP Minis and old PS1 games. I have so many Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, and Wii downloads that I am a little embarrassed. I have nothing against digital downloads, but it seems to me from looking into the muddy waters of the future that a war is coming between digital and physical goods.

The opening salvos in this war have already been fired.

As I write this, Valve’s Steam service has well over a million users online, downloading and playing games.

But does a digital copy have the same value as a physical disc? There are pros and cons to both. If I own a game, I can take it over to a friend’s house to play. I can even lend it to them. I can pretend it’s a Frisbee if I want, or use it to make my coffee table stop wobbling. I can even throw it in the microwave and watch the light show. The point is, it’s mine and I can do whatever the heck I want with it.

This is not always the case with a digital copy. Read the fine print. Go ahead, we’ll wait. In many cases you are not buying the game, but rather access to the game. There is a subtle but profound difference between the two. In one case, it is yours. In the other, it is someone else’s, and they are granting you access to it.

Amazon’s Kindle users have already had issues where books that users thought they had purchased once and forever were removed from their devices because of contract disputes. Amazon would need to send a SWAT team if they wanted to break into my house to take a physical copy of a book back. (My dog Buttons would annihilate any interlopers.) Can you imagine Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft deciding that the copy of Sonic that you purchased wasn’t really yours after all?

Should I have to pay as much for a physical copy that is mine (for good or ill) as a digital copy that I might own until some corporation decides that I really don’t? Is the convenience of a digital copy worth the loss of the physical copy? My digital copy of Serious Sam won’t ever get accidentally stepped on by my roommate, but at the same time I can’t loan him my digital copy to play in his room.

What gets really crazy is when you start getting into digital items like clothes for your Xbox Live avatar or themes for your dashboard. There are communities that have sprung up around customizing everything from digital cars, to people, to little Sackboys. Personally, I wouldn’t give a single real world penny for my Oprah to get a new digital sweatshirt (my Xbox Live avatar is Oprah. Don’t ask). Other people are happy to part with their money for things that differentiate their little digital representations. Is it worth pre-ordering a game so you can get a special set of armor? Gamestop sure hopes so.

The digital revolution is already upon us. The path the revolution takes is up to us. In the meantime I am going to go check out the latest Steam sale.

Sometimes a game will catch your eye for no other reason than an interesting piece of cover art. In the case of Toki Tori, it was the high adorability factor that drew me in.

Toki Tori was originally developed for the Game Boy Color by Two Tribes B.V. and released by Capcom. They have since done versions for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, WiiWare, and PC. The GBC version was itself an update of Eggbert for the MSX 2.

I saw it on one of the many Steam sales last year and picked it up on the cheap. I had heard it was a cross between Lemmings and a platformer. They had me at Lemmings.

It is a simple concept; You are a chicken trying to rescue your unhatched brethren. For some inexplicable reason, their eggs have been hidden throughout a series of maze-like levels. As Toki Tori, it is up to you to use everything at your disposal to save them.

Toki can’t jump or fly, but he can flap his underdeveloped wings (he is a newborn chick after all) to float down from any height to safety. More importantly is his access to puzzle solving tools. At the start of each level, you are given a limited number of tools used to solve that particular level’s puzzles (this is where the Lemmings comparison originates); everything from a gun that turns enemies into blocks of ice to simple platforms you can use to cross gaps. It is really all a matter of figuring out where and in what order to use the given items in to get to all the eggs.

You are given several options on the control scheme. You can use only the mouse, the keyboard, or even plug in a controller on the PC version. I can only assume on the iPhone edition it is completely touch based. For almost the entire first three worlds, I found using the mouse only controls to work really well. Later, once there were a lot more enemies on the screen and precise timing to run past them was required, I found the keyboard controls invaluable.

The Steam version had an update earlier this year that has increased my enjoyment of this game exponentially. Originally if you made any kind of mistake, you had to restart the entire level. The update added a rewind button that lets you go back as little or as much as you want. It feels like cheating at first, but once you hit some of the more complex levels, it will keep you from quitting the game out of frustration.

"Floating to Imminent Doom"

For a $5 puzzle game, you can do a lot worse than Toki Tori. It is a great one to pick up and play for a few minutes at a time. The difficulty doesn’t start to ramp up until near the end of the second world. If you are enjoying it but find it too easy, stick with it. The main game gets tougher and the 20 unlockable Hard levels put the regular levels to shame.

Most of the time, the Wingdamage offices are filled with sunshine, lollipops. But today I stand in defiance of that harmony. I read spambot‘s article and I find myself at the opposite end of the spectrum. Like the Pink and Orange hungry hungry hippos, we are staring at each other across a chasm of differences.

The PC will never replace the console for me. As much as I enjoy services like Steam, GOG, and Gametap the PC is always my second choice for gaming.

When I was a kid my family had a Commodore 64 and about a thousand pirated games. They came on the kind of floppy disks that were actually floppy.  To play them you had to remember the run command for each game, but for the most part the games were played with a joystick rather than the keyboard. We didn’t even have a real monitor for it; it was hooked up to an old television with actual dials to change channels.

As the rest of the world’s computers all received upgrade after upgrade or were replaced, my parents stuck with the C64. They were convinced that the only thing a computer was good for was word processing, and since the Commodore did word processing there was no need to buy a new computer. I was writing reports and hanging out with the Little Computer People for far longer than I care to admit.

For my gaming, I had to turn to the consoles for sustenance or play pirated Atari games. I would hear people talk about the amazing games they were playing on their PC’s but I was happy with my Super NES and my PS1.

When my parents did finally relent and buy a new computer it was just about time for me to head off to college, and I was a die hard console gamer. Now that I have my own PC (with a computer monitor and everything!) I still find myself unable to really get into PC gaming.

Part of the problem is I am not a technology geek in general, and I am certainly not a computer guy. I can make the thing run (kind of) and I can check my emails and twitter, but I am not the type of guy drooling over the spec sheet for the newest graphics card. This might be the almost 2 decades I spent with the Commodore 64.

I have always been of the opinion that half the fun for PC gaming is customizing your hardware to run the latest and greatest. Since I don’t even know what the difference is between a PCI Express and an IRQ, I miss out on all the fun of lording my geek knowledge over others.

I cannot stand it when my brand new game doesn’t run because I don’t have a driver for it, or they haven’t patched it so it will work with my graphics card. I work full time, write for three blogs, I am working on my third movie script and am in the process of setting up a marketing business. I also have giant stacks of comics to read. I don’t have a lot of time, so when I sit down to play a game, I want it to fire up and play. I don’t want to worry about it crashing after 20 minutes. I just want it to work. I don’t want to waste hours of my time fiddling with settings to get the game to work.

Even when games do work perfectly I can’t seem to get behind the mouse and keyboard. I realize that hardcore PC guys are scoffing in derision and I agree that for certain games the standard controller doesn’t give you nearly the flexibility or options that you get with the keyboard. However, I grew up with the joystick and then the game-pad. I just never feel perfectly comfortable with the keyboard. I find myself over analyzing and thinking about what button I am hitting instead of just playing the game. This causes me to feel slightly disconnected from the game I’m playing. Games are at their best when you forget you have a controller in your hand and you are just reacting to what is going on onscreen. With a mouse and keyboard I can never achieve this level of immersion.

As I have said before in my exciting and sexy article on split screen gaming, I prefer couch co-op to LAN or online. I like having the person I am playing with right there next to me. You can’t really have that experience with the PC. My wife can look over my shoulder while I play but she can’t really join in unless she goes to another computer.

So while Jonah drifts away from his console to his PC I will be over here with my shelves full of games.

"Fat Stacks (of games)"

Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, has now come and gone. Its follow-up, the invented by online retailers Cyber Monday is officially over.

While I didn’t brave the big box retailers, I did take advantage of many online deals. I ended up picking up Borderlands, Left 4 Dead, and Lucidity from Steam, and Mass Effect from Direct2Drive. I even snagged a copy of Resident Evil 5 from the very limited supply Amazon posted up on Monday.

Now I have lots of stuff to get through and hopefully get some reviews up in the next few weeks. But what I really want to know it, how about you? What deals did you take advantage of, game related or otherwise?