With Your Host, Rob Remakes

Tag: XBox

Exploratory Void Machine: Singularity

June 2023

Nearly but not quite finished with the current expedition in No Man’s Sky. It took me a few tries to get into the groove of expeditions given I generally don’t care much for the guided parts of No Man’s Sky, preferring to just tootle around of my own accord looking at pretty things. Initially, I treated expeditions as you would a battle pass – tasks to be cleared, numbers to go up, churn through for rewards – and I hated them, approaching them like that completely ruined the experience for me. Completely joyless.

Eventually, it dawned on me that the only thing making me approach expeditions in that manner was my own brain (well, and everyone who has built these absurd compulsion loops into games in recent years to train it into that but let’s not go there right now), sure there’s stuff to be done, shopping lists to tick off but plenty of tasks invariably don’t need to be tackled in order or with any great haste. They can be a ramble, a meander, and I can still spend plenty of time mucking around doing whatever I normally do without too much concern. So yeah, that’s buggering around taking a lot of pictures and doing something to appease the videogame shopping list gods whenever.

That’s much more like it! I don’t have the energy or the patience for a game pressuring me into stuff right now, I just want peace, lasers and pretty things. And to spend ten or so minutes at a time lining up screenshots, natch. Same as I ever was, really.


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Cataloguing The New Arcade: Debris Infinity

Whilst the high bar for Asteroids reinventions remains a tie between Spheres Of Chaos (I prefer the older version over 2012’s rejig but YMMV, they’re both available for free now) and Echoes (Again. I prefer + to 3 but honestly. It’s so close in quality as to be unimportant), Debris Infinity (available on Steam too) is certainly worth a mention also.

After being mildly disappointed by the recent Asteroids Recharged (it’s not a bad game but it did very little to excite me, I wouldn’t not recommend it but I’d not enthuse over it in a hurry either) I’ve been on the look out for a fresh & decent new arcade take on Asteroids and stumbled onto Debris Infinity pretty much by accident whilst rummaging for something else I’d forgotten the name of.

It’s a game that fuses, surprisingly successfully, Echoes style arena based asteroid shooting and familiar Geometry Wars enemy wave patterns across a handful of modes. So twin stick asteroids with bolt ons, essentially. I doubt anyone going into this, even having not played either of the games it borrows from, would find many surprises here.

It’s definitely scrappy! The art is a bit all over the shop both in style and in coherence, the asteroids and smaller enemies are great, it’s sort of just the rest of it that doesn’t always come together.

Which is fine, you know? I’m not complaining so much as just stating something rather obvious. I can’t say it bothered me even for a moment because I was far too busy trying not to crash my spaceship into things but it does mean it doesn’t present quite so well in a single screenshot.

So, it all kind of adds up to a game I enjoyed a lot but also, don’t really have all that much to talk about with it. It’s a good, solid, enjoyable Asteroids variant where everything glows really nicely and has enough flashing lights to keep me quiet.

I’ve been dipping in and out of it on the Switch but the game’s available most other places, except for PlayStation for whatever reason. Definitely worth a punt.


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Weapon Of Choice

It's a dude, on top of a giant snake/sandworm thing. It's really hard to describe how ridiculous this screenshot from Weapon Of Choice actually is.

If I could make just one videogame thing happen that wasn’t Alcatraz Harry 3, it would be for the bulk of XBLIG games to have a continued lease of life.

Happily, a number have escaped their confines and exist in ways people can play them much, much, much more easily in 2021 so it’s not a complete write off. I would always like more, you know?

Amongst the absolute best XBLIG work, in my entirely less than humble opinion, is the work of Mommy’s Best games. They’re dead good, all of them (though I confess, I bought but haven’t gotten round to putting decent time into Pig Eat Ball yet. What I have played of it is wild.)

It’s saying something when Weapon Of Choice is, to my mind, the least good of all of them and it is very good. I’d do murders to have a body of work that strong myself.

Perhaps it feeling less good to me is that in 2021 there’s a whole load of run and gun games, though my experience has largely been of the more retro ones, and that the ‘death brushing’ (the game adjusts when you’re about to have a nasty moment so as to give you a chance) is routine now where when Weapon Of Choice launched, it felt remarkably fresh. Well, for the genre anyway.

I cannot stress enough, it’s not that it’s aged badly – it hasn’t – it’s just wow, we have a lot of games now eh. And the small point that the games from the Mommy’s Best stable just got better and better and better and no less wild.

I’m writing this now because this morning I was super chuffed to find that Weapon Of Choice is now available on a whole bunch of modern consoles to play and it’s silly cheap to boot. Definitely the good kind of surprise when opening PSN for a gander this morning.

I honestly can’t recommend it enough. It’s a game that doesn’t screenshot well but running through the stages and encountering whatever thing comes next, it feels vibrant and alive in a way I wish every game could be.

The enemies are ridiculous, just completely ridiculous. Love ’em. Ah, what am I talking about? I love all of it. I didn’t quite get it the first time I looked at it and reviewed it on release but past me being wrong isn’t exactly a revelation these days.

Weapon Of Choice, then. Definitely my weapon of choice. For the budget price especially, it’s a lot of good game for not much money.


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