Fans of 2D shoot-em-ups tend to make up some of the oldest dedicated gamers around, and while titles like Ikaruga may make a splash here and there in the public consciousness, the fact is that this genre is largely populated by people who have transformed it from an ancient curiosity to an art form. And if it's an art form, Kenta Cho of ABA Games is our Michaelangelo. For the past few years, he's been releasing games that stretch the boundaries of the conventional 2D shoot-em-up ("shmup"). His latest, Gunroar, is no exception.

Mac gamers know well from years of playing through addictive Ambrosia Software classics that the game experience is not exclusively created by whatever it is the gamer is doing (blasting centipedes or asteroids or what have you) but is instead a product of both the actual physical gameplay and the atmosphere created by the sights and sounds of the game. aquadot! red is a particularly compelling example of this lesson. Yes, it is Pac-Man at its heart, but it is Pac-Man combined with a few gameplay tweaks and a wonderfully solemn atmosphere that make for a completely different game experience.

Gish! is the first game I've seen that is just straight up capital-I Indie, and there's really no way around it. Everything that could possibly be analyzed about Gish! simply smacks of another way of doing things, and I love it.

Somewhere out there is a design document for a rather small-time, independent shareware-game-that-could. This design document could be on a bar napkin, or a Post-It note, or maybe it's just a quickie little TextEdit document that has been since consigned to the depths of an unorganized documents folder. The beginnings are humble, and legitimately so, for the design document is only one sentence—no, a sentence fragment—and that sentence reads, "Dolphins with frickin' laser beams."

Everything about Derelict is refreshingly old-school arcade. It's so wonderfully in tune with the design staples of the classic '80s arcade game that everything in Derelict will feel natural to even the most basic gamer: run, shoot, and run again.

Ultratron has the essential trappings of an '80s arcade title, and it certainly encourages you to play it just like you would when you cut class to play arcade games at the local 7-11 back in the day. It even incorporates a central Internet scoreboard to recreate the thrill of entering your initials on the local Defender arcade cabinet high score to leave your mark on the local competition. But, interestingly enough (and I cannot say for sure if this was an intentional move by the game designers), something begins to happen while you play Ultratron that marks it as much more than just another arcade game...

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