TIME VIKING

This game is called TIME VIKING!!!!!ANDSPACERAPTOR. It's currently available somewhere in the Xbox Indie ghetto, costs about 70p, and looks splendid. I think you're fighting the Moon? I could be wrong. I need to get my Xbox hooked up again. If I'm very lucky I might even have some Bill Gates currency left on it.

Safari

20XX's Seventh Gen Favs #15 - The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai

The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai was like playing around with an interactive version of a school exercise book, its pages filled up with inky, lesson wasting, violence doodles. Stylistically, the artist is operating somewhere between Mirage Studio's Ninja Turtles comics and the grungy miserablism of James O'Barr. Characters are hunched and pained as the march towards their splotchy oblivion. Created by one-man dev team James Silva, Dishwasher would be notable on aesthetics alone. It genuinely feels like you're engaging with one person's imagination, all their favourite toys and tropes chucked into a meat grinder with themselves cast as the heroic kitchen staffer. What makes Dishwasher exceptional though is the Capcom fluid combat system. As well as layering in monochrome blitzing and crash-zoom reward prompts, Silva understood the importance of sound cues. As chaotic as the on-screen action got, the distinct, actionable noises ascribed to enemy attacks and player movement ensured you were never working with incomplete data.

Grinnin'

Announce trail for James Silva's latest, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. Vampire Smile is the sequel to last year's superplay surprise The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai; a title seething with monochrome blitzing, and crash-zoom reward prompts. It was like playing through a whole exercise book filled with lesson-waste violence doodles. Silva is a Disaster Year favourite, a one-man publishing house that regularly turns out minutely balanced slices of wonderful. Big things are expected. No pressure.

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1

That title. A sub-pound price point. How can you resist? I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 is a top-down twin-stick shooter by James Silva, whose priors include The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai for Indie Xbox Live, and Survival Crisis Z for Windows. Players take control of a lonely lethal-man tasked with vanquishing legions of rapid-assault undead. Front end is epilepsy shimmer, block pixel text on pitch backgrounds. Simultaneous four player. You play yourself. This is an experience. In game: skinny zombie grunts are soon joined by lumbering tanks, and enormous word stamps throb and inform the landscape. Dopey grindcore wails along the soundscape, all price alerts and boast chants, the text feedback making a karaoke of the grinding screech theme. Then spotlights appear, and the game shifts psychedelic, introducing abstract enemy types to match the music's tempo shift.

I MAED A GAME3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 nicely straddles the twin disciplines of yuk-yuk retro-by-design blasters, and art installation pieces. It jogs quick enough to please maths-minded bullet hell vets, whilst demonstrating a distinct one-think authoring. Control set-up is instinct accessible, and the title doesn't seek to hide its eccentricities behind mammoth progress. A wonderful introduction to community developed gaming, unfortunately marginalised out-the-box by Microsoft: rather than sell it upfront in the Live boot-up crawl, they'd prefer you to go hunting in sub-sections of sub-sections. The lack of Achievements, yet another bitter slight this title doesn't deserve.