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Boss fights (an almost heretical first for the game) placed on cube-shaped levels require players to keep tabs on enemies located on the other side of the map, while contoured arenas allow for twisting, disorientingly aimed shots on peanut-shaped maps. Later this year, members of that studio (now under the banner of Lucid Games) will release Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, painted with a thick glossy now-gen sheen, a host of updated online features, and the added twist that’s right there in the title: 3D maps. Soon thereafter, though, the developer folded, a few watered-down spin-offs were released, and time moved on. The interesting thing about that sequel, though, was that Bizarre Creations was able to repackage roughly the same game, albeit with miniscule changes that fine-tuned the experience even further. It helps that both games were HDTV showcases. If you wanted to see what the future of games looked like in the late 00’s, Retro Evolved 2 had it-online multiplayer let you team up with buddies around the world. Retro Evolved 2 built upon that simplicity with iterations on the original’s tried-and-true “shoot stuff and don’t get hit” ruleset-modes where you were unable to shoot, fought enemies in waves, gunned it against the clock, and so on. It hewed closer to something you’d see in an arcade 20 years earlier, but modernized it was, true to its title, “Retro Evolved.” Online scoreboards took high scores out of the living room, turning the in-person, chest-thumping, beat-that-score experience into a global level, pitting you against literally every single person playing the game to find who was the best.ĭevoid of fluff like “levels,” “characters,” or a “plot,” it iterated on the bare essentials.Ĭonsidering it was the then-best selling Xbox Live Arcade title in the early years of the 360, it’s not surprising that a sequel was released in 2008.
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Gone were the hellish barrage of bullets and pixel-perfect aliens or airships (or whatever needed to be shot at), Geometry Wars gave you a grid, a ship made out of a couple lines, and some squares, triangles and circles to shoot at.Īnd you know what? It was basically perfect.ĭevoid of fluff like “levels,” “characters,” or a “plot,” it iterated on the bare essentials, giving you two very simple tasks: navigate that grid and blow up those shapes. You’d be forgiven for not expecting too much out of Geometry Wars.Ĭonsidering its humble beginnings as a tossed-in minigame included with Project Gotham Racing 2, Bizarre Creations had the audacious idea of taking the entire shmup genre and boiling it down to a reduction of its barest ingredients.