Posts Tagged ‘XGen Studios’
Raiden X Review–Those Were The Good Old Days
All right you young whippersnappers, with your fancy first person shooters and high-definition whosits and your surround sound whatchamajiggies–listen up. I’m about to give you a lesson in the old-school gaming style, back when we could count the number of bits involved in a game on both hands–ONCE. Back when music was tinny, and the gameplay was measured by how many enemies you could throw onto a single screen without getting crawl effect going.
Geriatric rambling aside, for a lesson in the kinds of games we had to play back in the eighties–and kudos to you if you remember the eighties–all you have to do is cruise on over to XGen Games and cut you off a sweet slice of Raiden X.
Designed as a tribute to Raiden and its sequel, Raiden 2, you play as a small jet fighter with one of three different kinds of upgradeable weaponry. You’ll fly in the classic top-down shooter mode, in an action-packed old-school environment.
This is what gaming used to be–if there was a story to games like Raiden X, you scarcely noticed because you were entirely too busy shooting whatever wandered into view. This is one of those great games where five minutes time invested into it allows you to get a full gaming experience, despite the fact that you really didn’t do much but move left to right and shoot things. It’s lots of fun, and though it might wear out its welcome quickly, you’ll always be ready for another go-round later on.
Motherload Game Review – Casual Gaming You Can Dig
Coming to you from the depths of the XGen Studios vault is a casual browser game that burned through a LOT more time than I care to admit. It’s called Motherload, and it is indeed a motherload of fun gaming.
In Motherload, you play a miner on the surface of Mars, but you won’t be on the surface very long as you drive your mining buggy down into the Martian soil in search of vast mineral wealth. You can upgrade your buggy with better hull plating, faster drills, better engines, and a panoply of additional devices including reserve fuel tanks, teleportation systems, and explosives.
Playing Motherload is a lot like playing that old game Dig Dug, only without the enemies and with lots and lots of greed. Completionists will find this game like crack as they tunnel through the soil and snatch up every last crumb of rock from beneath the planet’s surface. The graphics are, of course, only inches from 16-bit fugly, but the gameplay is both fluid and compelling, giving you that just-one-more-level feeling until you finally reach the surprise at the end. And it will be quite the surprise.
Motherload is a fantastic little time-waster that’ll keep you occupied for hours until you finally reach the end, and when you do, you’ll likely leave satisfied, the best measure of a casual game.