Back at E3, 1up gave you the lowdown on Blast Works' main game, but Majesco stopped by yesterday with a few new details on the game's "Editor" mode. BW will ship with a variety of pre-made ships, enemies, backgrounds, etc., but you can make all of those on your own by placing, resizing, coloring and connecting shapes in a pretty easy-to-grasp interface. Aspiring shooter creators should know that you can also edit "hitbox" placements, weapon power-ups and their preset bullet patterns. Considering Blast Works started as a one-man indie project, it's nice to see Majesco passing on that creative spirit to everyone who buys it.
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."
