Gamers are used to placing their virtual lives on the line -- and the more lives the better. But how often are you also challenged to sow the seeds of your own destruction?
Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy is a side-scrolling 2D shooter for the Wii in the mold of all the classics of the genre, whose deceptively simple-looking graphics belie a complex set of game-building tools. It's been cloned by Budcat Creations for Majesco from the Japanese game, Tumiki Fighters.
As the power of consoles grows over time, developers have a tendency to try and squeeze every last bit of graphical grunt out of a machine that they can. Games get more graphically impressive, then, but there are times when gameplay can take a backseat to all this eye candy. With that in mind, it's always welcome to see a game that focuses on gameplay over visuals. A game that recognises that being simple and straightforward can still be a lot of fun. That game is Blastworks: Build, Fuse and Destroy.
Green Pixels: Plunking down $50 for a brand-new game can be a gamble -- it's a lot of money to pay for something that you could end up hating. However, most games don't stay full-price for long, which is why we scoured the inventories of four major retailers (Amazon, GameStop, Target, Walmart) to find a slew of great titles that are now priced at just $20. For the cost of one freshly released game, you can buy two older titles and still have $10 left to spend on snacks. (And we all know the importance of snacks.)
BT writes: "Back when I was a kid, in the eighties, I used to love those old side scrolling shooters that you'd find in your local arcade, my favourite at the time was the original Gradius. Its power up system was something new at the time, blasting enemies to increase your fire-power."
