by rbelmont - 03.22.08
Sometimes in this day and age, I feel that we forget what makes a game. You always hear reviews knocking games for not looking like Gears of War or sounding like Super Mario Galaxy. You’ll hear reviews complaining about the shallowness of a plot or underdeveloped characters. But in my mind, for a game to be good, all it needs to be is fun.
If you are looking for one of those flashy games, you won’t find it here. However, if you are looking for an awesome pure-gameplay experience that features both a ninja AND a shotgun, then you’ve found it.
Shotgun Ninja is a fairly straightforward platformer by Cactus, an excellent Game Maker user. The game features a ninja that uses acrobatics (including a walljump!), a shotgun, and grenades to defeat his foes and get to the exit. The game has a point system that rewards you for kills, shots fired, grenades used, etc. And basically that’s all there is to the game: try to get points and get to the end of the level.
The graphics are based on classic gaming systems, or computers, like the Atari and Commodore 64. I really like when indie games take the NES or SNES graphics approach, but I wasn’t really sure about Atari-style graphics. However, in this case, it really works. It just further emphasizes gameplay as the most important aspect of the game. And it has chiptunes as music! Chiptunes are basically the ultimate video game music.
Anyway, despite being short (only eight levels long), it’s one of the most fun indie games that I have ever played. And like Banana Nababa, I assure you that you will have to play levels multiple times to beat them.
And guess what? You’ll have fun doing it.
This Cactus guy is starting to get famous.
Ray C - 03.22.08 6:08 pm
Fun but the physics were awkward to get used to.
Zkunk - 03.22.08 11:09 pm
yay, buckshot to the face!
fun stuff
AJ - 03.23.08 2:10 am
Physics were tough for me as well. So slidy and twitchy when you have to jump on/off the small platforms. Got up to level 7 but it’s so huge I couldn’t find the key, will try again later. Would be nice to have jump moved to a separate key as well, so when you want to throw a high grenade you don’t need to jump first and then continue to hold after landing. Very fun jumping on to the roof and shooting down though ahah.
SV - 03.23.08 4:07 am
just did it now, got 106,000 on first try with a lot of mistakes, took a while to get the wall jumping down, i’m always bad at that on keyboards… damn i need a good pc pad, might get one of them ps2 link things… very well presented piece of fun, thought the physics were fine, the 2 button setup seemed fine to me…
CriskaBean - 03.23.08 5:45 pm