Just downloaded this and ran a game; what fabulous fun!
For those who don't know, Shatter is an Arkanoid clone done with stylized old-school-inspired graphics layered over a 3D graphics background alongside a groovy synthesizer musical score.
It's not just an Arkanoid ripoff - although it IS an Arkanoid ripoff at heart of course... It also takes the original concept and runs with it. You can launch your own extra balls into the playfield (and lose them, like I tend to do haha), the playfield shifts from horizontal orientation to vertical and then back again, the previously immovable blocks you have to destroy break free of their bounds and start to drift, and so on...
Then there's the "suck" and the "blow" features also...
By sucking you effortlessly vacuum up small fragments released by destroying blocks. These fragments build your power meter which enables you to use the shield and your missiles. Suck also affects balls in play, as well as drifting blocks, powerups and so on. Conversely, blowing will push things away.
The shield is presumably to be used so that impacts with drifting objects don't knock your bat off the screen and lose you a life - however, I never remembered to use this feature. I was too busy trying to keep track of what was going on! I suppose it gets easier with practice.
I just adore the visuals and music in this game. I've wanted some decent old-school gfx spiffed up with modern high-tech for ages now, and to my delight there's quite a bunch of such games on the way. Shatter's one of the first, then there's Pixeljunk: Shooter and more further into the future. There's no fake rasterlines in Shatter though, I'd loved to have some but alas; you can't have all.
Unfortunately there's no awesome attract sequence in this game... Just a mostly static title screen with a couple balls flying around and a simple spinning starfield in the background. Super Stardust is the unbeaten PSN champion here.
Difficulty seems well tuned from my quick playthrough. It's not frustratingly difficult to handle the bat using the analog stick. In fact it works quite well, something I was rather sure would NOT be the case after reading about this game a while ago. Then again, the bat is fairly large too, and the game is forgiving in the way it handles collisions. If you ram the ball sideways with the bat it'll bounce back out into the playfield instead of clip through the bat and be lost as tends to be the case in old Arkanoid.
Score: 5/5. Excellent value for money!
For those who don't know, Shatter is an Arkanoid clone done with stylized old-school-inspired graphics layered over a 3D graphics background alongside a groovy synthesizer musical score.
It's not just an Arkanoid ripoff - although it IS an Arkanoid ripoff at heart of course... It also takes the original concept and runs with it. You can launch your own extra balls into the playfield (and lose them, like I tend to do haha), the playfield shifts from horizontal orientation to vertical and then back again, the previously immovable blocks you have to destroy break free of their bounds and start to drift, and so on...
Then there's the "suck" and the "blow" features also...
By sucking you effortlessly vacuum up small fragments released by destroying blocks. These fragments build your power meter which enables you to use the shield and your missiles. Suck also affects balls in play, as well as drifting blocks, powerups and so on. Conversely, blowing will push things away.The shield is presumably to be used so that impacts with drifting objects don't knock your bat off the screen and lose you a life - however, I never remembered to use this feature. I was too busy trying to keep track of what was going on!
I suppose it gets easier with practice.I just adore the visuals and music in this game. I've wanted some decent old-school gfx spiffed up with modern high-tech for ages now, and to my delight there's quite a bunch of such games on the way. Shatter's one of the first, then there's Pixeljunk: Shooter and more further into the future. There's no fake rasterlines in Shatter though, I'd loved to have some but alas; you can't have all.
Unfortunately there's no awesome attract sequence in this game... Just a mostly static title screen with a couple balls flying around and a simple spinning starfield in the background. Super Stardust is the unbeaten PSN champion here.
Difficulty seems well tuned from my quick playthrough. It's not frustratingly difficult to handle the bat using the analog stick. In fact it works quite well, something I was rather sure would NOT be the case after reading about this game a while ago. Then again, the bat is fairly large too, and the game is forgiving in the way it handles collisions. If you ram the ball sideways with the bat it'll bounce back out into the playfield instead of clip through the bat and be lost as tends to be the case in old Arkanoid.
Score: 5/5. Excellent value for money!
