I have a real soft spot for scrolling shooters, even more so for ones with spaceships and big explosions. I think this comes from playing Xenon 2: Megablast literally hundreds of times when I was young – it was the most impressive game for my Dell 316SX – a 386 running at an almighty 16Mhz with 640K RAM. The music was divine – considering my computer didn’t have a soundcard, just the onboard speaker. I’m still amazed how they managed to get Xenon 2 running on a machine like that. The Bitmap Brothers were real heroes of mine; Gods of game programming.
Anyway, this post isn’t about Xenon 2, it’s about the absurdly named “Space Deadbeef“, a side-scrolling shooter by Yuri Yashuhara of IDP. It’s a great looking game, and the gameplay is reasonably satisfying. Where it fails is the control of the player ship. I like the idea behind the mechanism, but it doesn’t quite work. Movement is dictated by the vertical position of your finger on the screen; you can only move vertically, which is rather odd. Firing depends where you touch the screen – if your finger is over your ship, you can build up a powerful blast (similar to R-Type), or if you swipe your finger over enemies, it locks on a number of missiles that are then fired when you release your finger. It kind of works – but doesn’t feel 100% right. The game is also too short, it’s just one stage which you can play over and over again, with it getting tougher each time.
Despite the negative comments about the control of the ship, it’s definitely worth downloading, as it’s absolutely free, and a good taste of what’s to come on the iPhone.
On a final note, I honestly think the iPhone would really benefit from an additonal controller for gaming, as some types of games just don’t work well on the iPhone. I hope we’ll see an official one soon – perhaps it could include an extra battery too..
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