Hikware
Salutations,
How have you been? I am dead tired for some reason, so I'll try to keep this short, for the greater good; for Mother Russia.
Man, I love me some freeware shooters. Tonight's topic is Ray Hound, an odd but intriguing little game I found while browsing 1up.com's 101 best free games list. Lacking Cave Story, the list's validity is questionable, but that is a discussion for another day.
RH is a shooter where you can't shoot. It is neither horizontal nor vertical scrolling game, but takes place in an "arena" of fixed size. Enemies spawn and you must defeat a fixed number each level in order to progress. Naturally, the amount increases as you get to higher stages. You control your ship with the mouse, which takes some getting used to. Clicking creates some sort of magnetic, polarity reversing field around the spacecraft that you use to capture enemy fire. By holding down the button, you can pull around all the lasers you amassed and drag them into enemies. If you are really hot stuff, you can release the lasers and send them flying into the targets, but this requires some practice; the shots you trap are constantly circling you in a roughly elliptical pattern and leave at difficult-to-predict angles. However, destroying multiple enemies with one release does yield a bonus multiplier. It reminds me somewhat of Mars Matrix, but as I recall that was easier to control.
In the later levels, Ray Hound looks pretty cool, with laser beams criss-crossing the play field at every conceivable angle, but besides that the game is not much to see. Then again, what do you expect with freeware? There is no music, which is a bummer. A dearth of options also holds the game back, but again, it is not commercially distributed. If it sounds at all interesting to you, there is really no reason not to check it out, but don't expect anything more than a fairly unique time waster.
I really need to start linking more stuff. All the other kids are doing it, but I'm too lazy at the moment. That's all for now.
Special Operations Foxhound,
Revolver Ocelot
2 comments:
I believe I may have downloaded and played this briefly. I should check.
Also: if what you say about 1Ups list is true, then 1up is wrong. There is no debate about this. They are just wrong.
And maybe someone should get fired.
I was slightly mistaken, they apparently put out one of these lists every year, so it was probably on a previous one.
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