thebooboo
Still Fresh
(Relevant links and screenshots to follow shortly)
Japanese hardcore solo developer Kenta Cho is well-renowned on the indie-shooter scene and his website is packed with innovative and highly addictive free shooters, mainly for Windows. Noiz2sa is one of his earlier efforts and as such uses C and SDL rather than the OpenGL/D combination he has come to favour with later games such as Torus Trooper, making it a prime candidate for porting to consoles, and indeed ported it has been, firstly to the Dreamcast, and now, descended from that port, to the GP2X.
Upon loading up, you're immediately struck with how wonderfully stylised the graphics are. Drawing inspiration from hip, simplistic graphic design of recent times (most obviously Tetsuya Mutzuguchi's cult shooter Rez), everything in the game is composed of rectangles, other than the text which is in a "digital watch" style font. An obvious benfit of this for Kenta Cho is that it allowed him to minimise time spent on the game graphics while ensuring a highly polished look and feel, and it works beautifully.
Accompanied by techno music of varying quality, you're thrust into a frantic blaster reminiscent of Treasure classics "Radiant Silvergun" and "Ikaragua", with a default twin-firing, vertically scrolling configuration and no power-ups. Each level is a bewildering survival challenge against a barrage of bullets fired by the abstract enemies, and given real variety and challenge from their consumate coding in Kenta Cho's own "bulletML" markup language. Vast quantities of points-increasing bonuses drift down from destroyed enemies, making an ecstatic score-attack frenzy of the proceedings. After finishing off a boss composed of a larger rectangle orbited by smaller ones, it's level complete, and the subsequent challenge thereafter is to beat your high score.
This is a wonderfully complete and polished game, especially considering it's a free homebrew product. It's possibly hampered a little by the minimal, hardcore gameplay, which for me is best in short bursts, and the slightly varying framerate and occasional screen lock-ups, although this may be attributable to the GP2X's SDL libraries rather than the efforts of the original developer or porter.
In short, the best free shooter on the GP2X, and one of the best free homebrew games available for it overall. Miss it at your peril!
Score - 9/10
Japanese hardcore solo developer Kenta Cho is well-renowned on the indie-shooter scene and his website is packed with innovative and highly addictive free shooters, mainly for Windows. Noiz2sa is one of his earlier efforts and as such uses C and SDL rather than the OpenGL/D combination he has come to favour with later games such as Torus Trooper, making it a prime candidate for porting to consoles, and indeed ported it has been, firstly to the Dreamcast, and now, descended from that port, to the GP2X.
Upon loading up, you're immediately struck with how wonderfully stylised the graphics are. Drawing inspiration from hip, simplistic graphic design of recent times (most obviously Tetsuya Mutzuguchi's cult shooter Rez), everything in the game is composed of rectangles, other than the text which is in a "digital watch" style font. An obvious benfit of this for Kenta Cho is that it allowed him to minimise time spent on the game graphics while ensuring a highly polished look and feel, and it works beautifully.
Accompanied by techno music of varying quality, you're thrust into a frantic blaster reminiscent of Treasure classics "Radiant Silvergun" and "Ikaragua", with a default twin-firing, vertically scrolling configuration and no power-ups. Each level is a bewildering survival challenge against a barrage of bullets fired by the abstract enemies, and given real variety and challenge from their consumate coding in Kenta Cho's own "bulletML" markup language. Vast quantities of points-increasing bonuses drift down from destroyed enemies, making an ecstatic score-attack frenzy of the proceedings. After finishing off a boss composed of a larger rectangle orbited by smaller ones, it's level complete, and the subsequent challenge thereafter is to beat your high score.
This is a wonderfully complete and polished game, especially considering it's a free homebrew product. It's possibly hampered a little by the minimal, hardcore gameplay, which for me is best in short bursts, and the slightly varying framerate and occasional screen lock-ups, although this may be attributable to the GP2X's SDL libraries rather than the efforts of the original developer or porter.
In short, the best free shooter on the GP2X, and one of the best free homebrew games available for it overall. Miss it at your peril!
Score - 9/10
And you are right, it seems like no one took the initiative to port it at this time.
