Featured New Flash Retro Game: Space Gate

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We are incredibly proud to present our first new featured retro Flash game on the re-vamped 8bitrocket.com: Space Gate by Barnaby Byrne (AKA Badger Manufacture). As the first ever sponsored game by the wonderful new portal, Odo Games (run by Richard Hoddinott), Space Gate is one of my favorite Flash shooters of all time, and quite possibly my favorite retro-shooter bar none. Inspired by the 8 and 16 bit classic “fly over  the gi-fooking-gagantic space ship and blast the hell out everything you see” genre, it typifies the type of games we hold dear at 8bitrocket (this genre is also the partial origin of our site’s name).

This “mega-blast”er also has elements of Galaga, Xenon 2, Centipede and countless other retro thumb-killers. The best part… “AUTO-FREAKING-FIRE”. You just concentrate on dodging the beautifully rendered ordinance while taking in the sparkling particle effects and leave the firing up to your space cruiser’s weapon systems.

The action, sonics, and over all “zar jaz” in this contest are so outstanding that I contacted Barnaby to ask him some questions about the origin of his masterpiece. It turns out that he is a huge 8bitrocket fan and he used some of our ideas and code to help create the foundation of his game. One thing that impressed me the most was the enemy pattern implementation especially given that this game is created on a fully blit canvas. Barnaby agreed to share his AS3 class  and thoery with our readers and explain how it works.

Here is the tutorial he prepared.

Space Gate is the first ever sponsored game from the new portal, Odo Games, Odo Games  is the type of portal we love to support here at 8bitrocket. It was created by a game developer for his own games and it blossomed into a full blown portal to feature the best games he could find. I emailed Richard to ask him about the his portal and his first sponsored game. Here is what he had to say:

“I started Odo Games earlier this year as a place to showcase a few of my own games.  I gradually added more games to the site and it now has around 150 carefully selected games written by some of the best developers on the scene.  None of that is any good though if nobody know sthe site exists, so in order to get the word out I needed to find a great game to sponsor and get the Odo Games logo seen by the world.  I spent a lot of time searching for a great launch title, and as it was my first ever sponsorship, I was quite apprehensive about picking the right game.”
Then Space Gate came along.  Just occasionally you come across a game where you just know that it was made for the sheer joy of it, and all of the passion the developer has for playing and developing games shines through in one beautifully crafted piece of work.  Space Gate is a prime example of this, and I knew instantly that this was the game I wanted to represent my site.
“After chatting with Badger (or Barnaby, whichever he prefers to be called) I knew we were on the same wavelength and we began working together to get the game ready for launch.  I’m honoured to have the Odo Games branding displayed in such a superb game, and I can’t wait to see what Badger comes up with for his next project.  Anyone who wants to play Space Gate and other great games like it should pop along to www.odgomes.com and see what we have to offer.

Contact: ric[at]odogames[dot]com if you feel you have a game worthy of his sponsorship.”

Play Space Gate Now! I guarantee you will be as impressed as I am.

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