It wasn’t until I did some research on the internet did I discover that Super Stardust HD for the PlayStation 3 is a sequel to an old Amiga computer game called Stardust.  The Amiga game was released in 1993, and this PS3 version was released in 2007.  Super Stardust HD is a twin-stick shoot-em-up with a control scheme similar to Robotron 2084 or Geometry Wars.  You move your spaceship with the left analog stick, and you can shoot in a different direction using the right analog stick.  These online stores that were introduced to consoles in the mid 2000’s have been a great thing for games like these, since not many publishers would go through the production of making, and distributing physical copies of such a niche genre of game.

The goal of Super Stardust HD is to shoot everything that moves.  Your main enemies are asteroids, and similar to Atari’s Asteroids game, they will break apart into smaller pieces when you shoot them.  These asteroids are made of up either rock, ice, or gold.  You can switch between three weapons that are supposed to be most effective against each type of asteroids.  There are also aliens to worry about, and at the end of each level there are large bosses to defeat.  To help you along, you can upgrade each of those three weapons, plus you have “smart bombs”, and a boost that allows your ship to smash through asteroids and enemies.

The game is pretty simple, but it’s a lot of fun.  There is just enough added to the twin-stick shooter formula to make the game interesting.  Despite being an early PS3 game, it looks really good.  The planet you are defending looks great as you orbit around it.  The asteroids also look nice when they are spinning around.  The explosions look nice with all of the particle effects.  This is pretty much a must have for old school arcade game lovers.

Child of Eden is one of those trippy looking, crazy sounding, hard to explain, but yet simple games that I love to play.  It was developed by Q Entertainment who’s people were responsible for other bizarre games such as Rez, Space Channel 5, Lumines, and Every Extend Extreme Extra.  This is a type of game that doesn’t get made very often these days, so when one comes out I’m hoping it’s good.  This is indeed a good one.

What disappointing box art this is. The center of this game Lumi should have been on the cover.

The story is actually kind of interesting, although you won’t actually see much of a story pan out as it’s just mostly text.  The Coles Notes version is that in the year 2019 Lumi was the first girl born in outer space.  As time goes on the history of mankind is recorded, and archived on the internet which is now known as Eden.  After Lumi dies, her memories are recorded, and stored in Eden (aka the internet.)  Later in the 23rd century, scientists try to recreate Lumi using this data, but they find that it is infected with viruses so to speak.  Your job is to purify these files, so you can save Lumi.  This is certainly the first game I have ever played where my character is antivirus software.  The actual game play itself is that of a first person shooter on rails.  In other words you fly automatically, and have limited control of the camera.  You aim your crosshairs at enemies, and you can either shoot them immediately with your tracer, or you can use a laser to lock on to up to eight enemies at once.  Defeating eight enemies at once gets you more points, and doing it with the beat of the music gets you a point multiplier.  The tracer is the only weapon that can defeat purple enemies, and the only weapon that can shoot at enemy missiles.  Activating Euphoria is like using a smart bomb as it defeats all enemies on screen at once.  You can pick up extra health, and extra Euphorias along the way.  At the end of each stage is a boss battle.

Child of Eden is a type of game that you play for the trippy experience.  It’s also a game that you play for a high score, as there are only five stages, and each one lasts about 15 minutes.  It will take you a few tries to get past some of these stages though.  In fact I have never made it past stage four.  The graphics are absolutely wild, and colourful.  The enemies take the shape of jellyfish, birds, worms, plants, and other stuff that I’m not even sure of.  The stages are even more trippy than that.  The graphics are sometimes just wireframes, and other times they are changing colours.  When you get closer to defeating one of the bosses, the video of Lumi singing and dancing starts to become more clearer and smoother.  It’s a really cool thing, and makes you feel like you actually are rescuing somebody.  That music is really great too, as are the sound effects.  Often times the sound effects fit right into the music.

This is such a fun game to play.  I really enjoy trying to get past the stages, going for highscores, and unlocking the artwork.  There is also an easy mode where you’re invincible, so you can relax, and enjoy the sights and sounds without stressing over dieing.  I should also note that the game supports the PlayStation Move for control, Xbox 360 Kinect, and it supports 3D televisions for the PS3.  I wish I had a PS Move, 3DTV, plus surround sound for the ultimate experience, but I’m going to make sure I hold on to this game for the day I do get all that stuff.  If this type of game appeals to you, I suggest you find it immediately, because they just don’t make them like this very often.

Midway Arcade Origins is an awesome compilation of 31 classic arcade games mostly from the 1980’s, and a few from the 1990’s.  Not only does it include Midway’s games, but also games from Williams, and Atari, as all three of those companies went out of business at one point, and now all the rights to their games are owned by the publisher of this compilation Warner Bros.  The games included in this compilation are: Joust, Defender, Rampage, Total Carnage, Gauntlet, 720, APB, Arch Rivals, Bubbles, Championship Sprint, Tournament Cyberball 2072, Defender 2, Gauntlet 2, Joust 2, Marble Madness, Pit-Fighter, Rampart, Robotron 2084, Root Beer Tapper, Satan’s Hollow, Sinistar, Smash TV, Spy Hunter, Spy Hunter 2, Super Off Road, Super Sprint, Toobin, Vindicators Part 2, Wizard of Wor, Xenophobe, and Xybots.

Very cool artwork here.

Naturally the PlayStation 3 has no problems emulating these 20-30 year old games, so they look and sound great.  If you find that your HDTV a bit too sharp, you can apply filters to smooth out the graphics a bit.  Each game offers two ways to play.  In the score attack mode you play with the default arcade difficulty, and with only one quarter.  You play to see how high of a score you can get.  This is the mode in which you can unlock trophies for getting a certain score, or getting to a certain level.  Your score is also posted to online leaderboards.  After playing some of these games 30 years ago, it was very interesting to see which ones I was best at relative to the rest of the world.  In the free play mode, you are free to change the difficulty, starting lives, etc, and can also press a button to insert more quarters for games that allow you to continue.

I could go in depth about all 31 games, but that would take forever, and most of these games are pretty well known.  Even if you only like half of them, you’ll still get your money’s worth.  It’s also a great multiplayer game, as over half of the games support two player simultaneous play, and some support 3 and 4 players.  The interface for selecting games is very nice, and efficient.  It shows a picture of the arcade cabinet of each game as your scrolling through them.  It’s also very easy to switch to another games, and it’s also easy to access the online leaderboards.  Of note, the games that have special controllers, such as Marble Madness, and all of the racing games, I found these a bit difficult to control.  With enough practice you can get good at them, but they may not be as fun as you remember without their steering wheel, or trackball.  Iffy controls on a handful of games doesn’t ruin the fun of the rest.  I even found a few games that I’ve never played before, and found those to be very fun as well.  I’m very glad Warner Bros decided that instead of selling each game for $5 online, that they decided to give us a physical disc with 31 games for a much cheaper (I paid $20) price.  It’s a must have for all classic arcade game fans.

I love fighting games, even though I generally suck at playing them.  It’s always cool to see the rosters of two fighting games in the same game.  Street Fighter of course is the legendary Capcom 2D fighter that has been around since the late 1980’s.  Tekken is a 3D fighter that has been around since the mid 1990’s.  Street Fighter X Tekken (the X is pronounced “cross”) is a 2D fighter released by Capcom in 2012 for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Exciting cover art, okay game, and dastardly DLC policy.

Street Fighter X Tekken is a two on two tag team fighter, which means you can switch between your two fighters, and the first team to knock anyone out wins the round.  It uses the 6-button Street Fighter control scheme, and similar commands for the special moves.  Special moves of course would be moves such as throwing fireballs.  These special moves have been around since at least Street Fighter 2 back in the early 1990’s.  With each release of Street Fighter over the years, there have been more and more features added.  This games has not only special moves, but EX special moves, cross cancels, forward roll recoveries, launchers, boost combos, cross rushes, super arts, super charges, cross arts, cross assaults, pandora, and all sorts of customizable gems that you can activate in battle.  I learned some of these techniques in the helpful tutorial, and was able to use some of them.  I left the game for a few weeks though, and when I came back to it, I had no idea how to do anything.  You really need to be a dedicated Street Fighter player in order to be masterful of all of these techniques.  Luckily though, you can also just play the game using normal kicks, punches, throws, basic special moves, and basic moves.  I find that spamming the heavy kicks and punches works well.

Since I’m not great at fighting games, and I don’t have the time to learn, and appreciate all of the game mechanics, I instead judge fighting games on their fun factor.  I like fighting games that have style, and are simply fun to play.  I find this game to be merely okay.  For me it’s just missing that special X factor that makes a game fun.  I can’t really put my finger on what it’s missing.  There isn’t anything special in this game for me, and that includes the characters, graphics, and music.  There is nothing wrong with any of it, except the fact that the game is less than the sum of it’s parts.  It could be the fact that I don’t like 6-button control schemes, because I hate using the shoulder buttons for attacks.  If you’re a Street Fighter fan, then you should definitely get this game, although you probably already have it by now.

On a side note, only 41 of the 53 on the character selection screen are accessible right away.  After completing arcade mode several times, and doing some missions, I was puzzled as to how to unlock them.  I later learned that you have to pay for these characters.  I also learned that all the data, and programming for the characters are already on the disc!  Basically you’re paying to play part of the game that you already paid for.  I’m going to have to research any future Capcom game I intend to purchase.