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jp's Velocity Ultra (VITA)
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| [March 22, 2017 07:15:37 PM]
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I don't often play 2D space shooters - I'm just not that good at them, but I have been wondering what design innovation looks like in this space. Most of what I've heard has to do with what sound like hyper-specialized combo/score systems and variations of Ikaruga's mode-switching (where you change modes and thus become vulnerable or invulnerable to certain kinds of enemies/bullets).
Velocity Ultra does add something I hadn't quite seen before (not saying it's new, just that it's new to me): backtracking in a 2D space shooter. It's kind of surprising how this affects the pacing and level of intensity of a shooter. Though, to be fair, this isn't a super intense game either - you're normally flying around slowly (you can boost to go faster), there aren't that many enemies, and it's more about navigating the space because you can also teleport. Tap somewhere on the screen and your ship teleports there. I'm not sure you can use it in combat effectively - but it's mostly about warping into secret areas or warping forward because there's an impassable barrier in front of you.
Anyways, a few levels ago (I'm about halfway through at this point, 23/50?) a new type of teleporting was introduced. You can press triangle to "drop" a warp spot and then, once you've moved past it, you can bring up the map, select your warp spot and warp back to that spot. Most levels now require that you do it because they have branching paths (and you need to explore both) as well as targets you need to destroy in a particular order that is not the order in which they appear (so you might have to destroy "1" and then warp back to destroy "2" and so on). There's lots of these and there also often interconnected ('cause there are numbers and also colors - the most I've had in a level so far was three colors and each with numbers up to 9 - I think. There was a LOT of backtracking).
I'm not entirely sold on the idea, but it is fresh and it does work. I'm just not sure that it's made the game more compelling...but maybe I've only seen the "simple" levels?
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jp's Velocity Ultra (VITA)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 10 March, 2017
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