aba-games posts

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

It's been quite a while since we have featured a Kenta Cho game on Freeware Friday, as... well, it's been a while since Kenta Cho has released a new game. He's finally broken the silence, however, and bestowed upon us the majesty (or frenetic action, I can never tell which!) of GearToyGear. Much in the same line of reasoning as Torus Trooper, GearToyGear is a fast-paced shmup that takes place inside a tube. Oh, and you will die a lot. Trust us on this one. This is not a game for the easily frustrated.

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

It's a return to the roots. Not a return to gaming roots, but rather a return to the roots of Freeware Friday. I haven't featured a shoot-em-up (or shmup) in a while, but long-time readers will know that I have a not so secret love of dodging ships, insane amounts of fire, and explosions galore. You know, shmup stuff! And who is better at the shmup genre than Kenta Cho? Not many people, that's for sure. While he has a large library of games, only one was ever published, and TUMIKI Fighters is that game. Wii owners may know it as Blastworks, but indie PC fans know it as one of the most innovative shmups around.

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

Much like food, there are games that we always go back to after performing an excursion into the vast wilderness of the frontier. These are our comfort games, the ones that we can always depend on to be full of replayability and excellent game mechanics. The kind of game that we sit down and play between rounds of Team Fortress 2 or after a long marathon session of Oblivion. Kenta Cho's shmup games, like Torus Trooper and rRootage, are comfort games thanks to their endless replayability and arcade-style addictiveness. Gaming comfort food. And Gunroar is among their ranks as well.

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

One can't talk about freeware shoot 'em ups without bringing up the incomparable Kenta Cho, otherwise known as ABA Games. More so than any other independent developer barring maybe ZUN, he is an extremely prolific shmup developer and has delivered several classics to the scene. He has even developed a publicly available scripting language, called BulletML, to chart the paths of bullets in games. His work often compare favorably to commercial games in their polish and replayability, and they can be found across a myriad of platforms, from the PSP to the Palm. One of the best examples of his work is the disorienting, yet amazing, Torus Trooper.