Archive for July, 2009

“What the heck is Jimmy talking about?” you’re probably asking. I’m asking that myself as well. There is a game coming to the PSN called Retro/Grade, and it’s a reverse side-scrolling shooter so to speak, and everything is played in reverse…

Yeah, I got lost too, but apparently, it’s more a rhythm game than a shooter. The game is being developed by 24 Caret Games, and this is their first title. According to Matt Gilgenbach, one of the company’s co-founders, this is the premise:

Retro/Grade stars ace fighter pilot Rick Rocket who has just saved the universe. Unfortunately, the massive destruction he left in his wake has caused a temporal anomaly that reversed the flow of time. You must assume control of Rick’s spacecraft and fight through the epic space battle… in reverse!

What’s even weirder, since it all plays in reverse, is the way you play it:

Rick must undo his actions exactly the reverse of the way he performed them in the first place. That means he has to get in the appropriate space lane from which his shot was fired and press the shoot button at the appropriate time. As well, he must avoid blocking the path of the enemy shots as they return to the enemy’s guns. If he blocks their path, it creates a paradox since he is stopping the shot before it was ever fired.

I don’t know about you, but this is one of the weirdest games I’ve heard of, and it’s nice seeing this kind of creativity in the world of over-populated run-of-the-mill genres we’ve become familiar with, and I’m hoping to see this game succeed, because we need this kind of ‘forward’ thinking to keep games from becoming stale. Not to mention, the game was also one of the finalists for the Independent Games Festival. You can check out their official site for a few more videos and information. Original news story from the Official Blog. No word on release date or anything yet, but they said you can follow them on Facebook for news and updates on there as well. What’s your opinion on this?