I am curious about this two game, could somebody tell me how the games looks like! And tell me what're there genre!
How does Smashbreak and earthshield look like????
(16 posts) (7 voices)-
Posted 3 years ago #
-
JeremyR
MemberNot really. It's not super terrible, but it's really basic.
You can't tell from the blurriness, but almost all the enemies are simple polygons or shapes. Diamonds, Os, stars, like fighting breakfast cereal.
And it's timed, you only play for 3 minutes. Which I guess is good if you want to kill 3 minutes, but still....
Posted 3 years ago # -
^^ thx everyone for all the pictures and info. Now I know what the games look like^^!
Posted 3 years ago # -
JeremyR
MemberOkay, inspired by pspgamer, I recorded a short video of Earthshield and uploaded it to youtube.
Harder to do than I thought. Little shaky at times and I died quickly because I had to hold it too far away. But you can see gameplay pretty well...
Posted 3 years ago # -
Topic, I command you, "Rise from Your Grave!"
I checked out Sony's Minis' user ratings in the Asia PS Store today. The Feel for Two games never had more than 3 ratings, but 3 of the 4 earlier Sony Minis had many (only Digi-Tiles had none). I am saddened to report that going by the qualifications JeremyR uses for the PSN User Ratings posts on the main blog, both Earthshield and Smashbreak would be in the list of highest rated Minis in the Asia-region Store, and The Legend of Kunoichi, even being a boring, bare-bones Whack-a-Mole clone, would come close. Most disturbing might be that Earthshield, which a halfway decent player can beat in under 10 3-minute plays, would probably be one of the highest-ranked titles in that list.
The only consolation is that I suspect most of those ratings came from when the games were free for PS+, so most people were judging them as completely costless games. The reason I suspect that is that almost no Minis in the Asian Store have anywhere near as many ratings as those games.
Posted 11 months ago # -
I disagree there. Of the four, I've played or own all of them, and they're all pretty dismal. My ordering, though, would differ from the site's ratings. From worst to best:
- The Legend of Kunoichi - This is Whack-a-Mole with a time limit of 3 or so minutes. Once you've managed a perfect run, which should take you less than five tries, maybe even only one if you're on top of things right off the bat, there is NO reason to ever play this again. As I recall, the only way to improve your score is to hope that the randomly generated ninja are ones worth more points; you can't do better through your own skill.
- Smashbreak - As a single-player game, this is pretty terrible. Maybe it works if you're one of those people who can play 2-player Ikaruga by yourself, but otherwise, advancing to the end is like trench warfare, slogging from one stage to the next, retrying a stage after each of the many times you die. As a 2-player game, it's okay, except that the mechanics don't make it much of an improvement over original Pong.
- Digi-Tiles - Conceptually, this should be the best of the four. It even looks pretty good, for what it is. However, the tiles you get in each stage are just random; if you lose, retrying a stage doesn't give you the same set. Thus, there is no actual progress in the game. Every stage, you're just playing around with some random numbers and operators (though with increasing complexity). It's like crumpling randomly different sheets of paper and trying to throw them into a waste basket; some are more likely to go in, some are less. Feels pointless.
- Earthshield - This has decent gameplay, but since it's 3 minutes long, it's not worth it. I mean that literally; if you equate each attempt to 25 cents, like on an arcade cabinet, playing until you get a perfect run may actually come to less than the $3 the game costs. I think I did it in less than $2 worth. To its credit, unlike Kunoichi, you can get a higher score if you accelerate the game enough so that there is still time left after the game proper ends (it then restarts the enemy pattern from the beginning). So if you're really bored, you can try to boost your high score by playing faster.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Actually, playing shooters to try to get as many points as possible within a set time limit is an existing method of play. It may stem directly from Hudson Soft's Caravan competitions from the 80s in Japan. Certainly, the 2- and 5-minute modes are available in their PC Engine Star Soldier games.
The 2 strikes against Earthshield, though, are a) that there is absolutely nothing else to the game and, worse, b) that it's simply not very hard. Maximizing your score within the time limit is meant to be a challenge, and while the mechanics are pretty good in Earthshield (namely, your per-kill points bonus resets if you get shot), the enemies themselves are actually fairly easy to manage once you've played it a few times. So, with the challenge not lasting long enough and there being nothing else to do, it quickly runs out of appeal.
I could not stomach Smashbreak for its grueling pace, but if you do enjoy its "manage 2 sides of the playing field" pattern of play, I think you should get Laughing Jackal's Duæl Invaders. That game gives a much better balance to this type of gameplay. It's also sort of a natural "evolution" for you to play that as a successor to Smashbreak; Smashbreak is like double Breakout, and Duæl Invaders is like double Space Invaders. The original Space Invaders by Taito was directly inspired by Atari's Breakout. :)
Posted 11 months ago #
Reply
You must log in to post.