Retro Flash Game Highlights: May 9th 2008
Here are 8bitrocket.com we have decided to start posting a weekly set of the best Retro and Retro inspired Flash games the world of viral gaming has to offer. This week we will start with 8 games that caught our interest from 100’s that we looked at this week.
First of all the name of this one is brilliant. “Tennis For You” is take on “Tennis For Two” which was the original tag line for Pong. Also, the sounds here are perfect, they elicit the feeling of being in the arcade in the 70’s. The game play is Pong with power-ups. A nice little diversion.
Magma is very well-made game in the vein of Bomberman. Smooth animation, nicely drawn sprites, and addictive game play. Blow stuff up, find the stones, avoid the baddies. 20 levels, and the maps are never the same twice!
Cosmic Trail 2 falls into the category of games that we like to call “Pixel Games”. These are games that look “retro”, but are actually much closer to the type of games that work virally on the web. In this game you fight asteroids by aiming the vapor trail of your ship at them. The game play is very smooth and mildly addictive.
asciiBot vs. The Binary Invaders 
Inspired double retro ASCII-art shooter! Retro looking art and retro playing. Near retro bliss. The lack of sound is kind of a bummer though.
Nice pong variation with cool particle explosions and obstacles. The more points you score, the more particles you earn. Run out of particles and lose. Warps significantly alter the ball’s course.
A really cool re-mix of Space Invaders. Smooth playing, extra weapons, a curved surface. I do worry that developers who make games like this might run into I.P. trouble though. It uses graphics and sound directly from the original game. Still, it shows tons of promise.
PongOut is a very interesting take on two classic games, both played at the same time! Try to play both Breakout and Pong simultaneously. Yeah, go ahead and try! We like this one because, while it has a retro feel, the idea that you have to play two games at once is the sort of game play tweak that could only work on the web.
Finally, we finish today with awesome arcade-style shooter with the feel of Williams’ Sinistar and possibly Namco’s Bosconian. Earn money to bolt-on extra weapons. The “energy” system is much like Sierra On-Line’s Threshhold where your guns overheat. Very cool, maybe one of the best shooters I’ve ever played in Flash. [besides our own Retro Blaster 😉 ]
That’s it for this week. If you have game you think is good enough for us to highlight, please drop us a line in the comments below or email us at info@8bitrocket.com.