unexperimental-shooters posts

How is this even a shooter? It's entered into the Experimental Gameplay Project's Unexperimental Shooters theme, but it has absolutely nothing to do with shooters. It doesn't matter however, because even without following the theme, Zombies!!! is a fun browser game that challenges you to recognize the right faces. It's an interesting concept that is made all the better by the fact that it is a beat-'em-up, which is not seen all that often any more.

In Zombies!!!, you must kill as many zombies as possible. Each zombie has a face over their head, which determines what weapons they can be damaged by. The weapons you have selected will only work on the zombie that is the intended target, with the exception of the fists, which work on everyone. If you are curious as to which face your weapon corresponds to, look at the face next to the health bar, as it shows you what faces the weapons can damage.

Socrates was known for his outstanding wit and deep philosophical arguments. His most famous saying is easily "I only know that I know nothing," and the method by which he came across the gem of humility is now known as the socratic method. But what if he didn't die? What if he was actually brought to the future to fight against a zombie army as a cyborg? This is the premise of Socratic Method, a Unity-based shooter made for the Experimental Gameplay Project's Unexperimental Shooters theme.

Socratic Method is easy to learn. You move around and gun down zombies. There's nothing fancy about it, just lots of gore-splattered action. Zombies spawn from portals at intermittent times, and once you have met your quota for zombies killed in the level, a ton of enemy portals open as well as the exit portal. Make it to the exit alive, and you've finished.

Most shmups have you die in only a single hit. However, not many make you invincible, but reset your multiplier whenever you take a hit. This is the concept of Obsessive Nuclear Testing Disorder, an entry into the Experimental Gameplay Project's Unexperimental Shooters theme. It's not the most amazing game ever made, but it's certainly fun and does a good job of making you think about where shmups can go.

Obsessive Nuclear Testing Disorder involves you gunning down ships to build up your multiplier. Every time you reach 7000 points, you get a nuke. You must then use these nukes on waves of enemy ships to get the real, recorded score. It balances reward and risk very well, although once you get so much multiplier, your nukes are self-sustaining.

For those without a Nintendo DS, there is a game called Electroplankton that music fans will no doubt enjoy. In it, you guide various plankton into making noises by bouncing around. BubbleBee, an entry into the Experimental Gameplay Project's Unexperimental Shooters theme, takes inspiration from this game and tosses in a little particle theory to add some interesting twists.

There is no way to win in BubbleBee. Rather, all you do is shoot little colored balls around inside a box. The balls collide with each other, conserving momentum and continuing around their little enclosed space. They can combine, and if they reach critical mass, an orchestral chord plays. It's an interesting distraction for the music-minded person

The most interesting applications, it seems, are the ones that have no real gameplay. This is the case with the Egg Worm Generator, a game that was originally intended to be an entry into the Experimental Gameplay Project's Unexperimental Shooters monthly theme. However, it eventually just turned into a strange little evolution simulation that is interesting to watch. You could even leave it on overnight and see how well your creatures do!

Egg Worm Generator is all about reaching the right side of the arena. The left side kills worms, making their genes lost forever. The next generation is spawned when either four worms reach the right side or sixty seconds pass. Each of these worms pass on their genetics to future worms, making the name of the game speedy movement to the right. You can see the 16 best speeds and worms in the little mini-leaderboard. Overall, a fun distraction or background application.

Most shooters nowadays follow the standard of kill enemies, acquire points, and use power-ups. What would happen, however, if they followed a more... communist style of gameplay? No points, no power-ups, just the eternal struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. That is the concept behind Kosmosis, an entry into the Experimental Gameplay Project's Unexperimental Shooters monthly theme.

In Kosmosis, you control a single proletariat that must go around the playing field, gathering up other people like him to strike out at the enemies of communism. In practice, the game creates a sort of flocking mechanism: you run around and gather people, and as you grow larger, the game begins to take on a life of its own. The end goal of the game is to reach 100% critical mass, which makes you win the game. You can read more about the development, as well as play the game, at the developer's website.

Not a lot of games utilize real-life objects to create interesting graphics. Imagine a game where the enemies are comprised of photos arranged in a mosaic, for example. Post I.T. Shooter is one of these rare games, but it's not unusual to see this sort of game from Petri Purho, who is best known for Crayon Physics. While the gameplay is nothing special, the catch is that everything is rendered in Post-It Notes. It's an interesting twist, and the pixel art is well done, if simplistic. The music is also hilarious, as it is some sort of mixture between a voice-over and lounge music.

You move around with the arrow keys, and attack with space. The only scoring is how many enemies you defeat before dying. You die in a single hit, so you must dodge every enemy shot. Enemies get tougher over time, and move faster as they get damaged. The hitbox for enemies is relatively small, and your hitbox is large, so be prepared to die quite a bit.

Horizontal shmups are, through some unknown virtue, naturally harder than vertical shooters. Some of the best horizontal shmups are almost impossible for the average person to complete, such as Gradius or R-Type. Proto Shooter is an entry in the Experimental Gameplay Project's "Unexperimental Shooter" monthly theme that follows this difficulty despite only having a few enemies and power-ups. How does it do this, you ask? By making score dependent on your accuracy, and then by speeding up enemies as time passes.

Proto Shooter is extremely simple to control. Move with the mouse, shoot with the left mouse button, trigger slow time with the right mouse button. You move slightly slower in slow time, but enemies slow to a crawl, making it easier to destroy them. Every shot counts in Proto Shooter, both literally and figuratively. Any missed shots count against accuracy, which is then applied to the enemy's base score. For example, if you have an accuracy of 0.97, and you kill an enemy worth 100 points, you only get 97 points.