![]() ![]() Kanakawa's contributions to the game are on constant display as you mine each's stages riches while fighting tooth and nail to the end. While each stage takes the form of a straightforward obstacle course-full of enemies to shoot, pits to leap, and many different traps to avoid-there are secrets hinted all around their periphery-false walls, hidden gold caches, and tantalizingly placed extra lives. This is all the tutorial you'll get before you find yourself running and gunning through a series of linear platformer stages. Step up to it, and your frog fellow answers, taking you to the menu to select a save file. Shoot them down, and the logo flickers to life like a neon sign, and a telephone in the center of the stage rings. Hovering above you is the game's title, where creatures resembling nothing more than bug-eyed clumps of darkness adhere to the grayed-out letters, apparently jamming them up somehow. The title screen itself is a self-contained stage, with a ladder on the right and a bit of raised terrain to hop over on the left. Now is a perfect time to correct that.įrom the moment you load Kero Blaster, you assume the role of a be-necktied frog clutching a laser gun. Despite the Cave Story connection, it seemed to fly under many people's radar the first time around, perhaps because it was only available on Windows and iOS. Moreover, Kero Blaster is particularly relevant at the moment as it just recently received a port to PlayStation 4. He did take on a second, Kiyoko Kanakawa, who handled level design and project management to get the game finished. Amaya is credited with programming, writing, character design, graphics, music, and sound effects. But it's still Pixel's latest game these things take time when one developer wears every hat on the rack. It's such a dominant line of thought that I'm going to do my best to refrain here.Īnd yes, you read that right: Kero Blaster has been out for three years now. In the three years since Kero Blaster's release, much of the discussion around it has focused on how it relates to Cave Story-how it compares, how it differs, how it lives in Cave Story's shadow, how it's less ambitious (but that's OK), and so on. This is especially true of Cave Story, the 2004 PC platformer that elevated Pixel to indie superstardom and has subsequently been ported by publishers and hobbyists alike to a bevy of platforms-even the Dreamcast, of all things. (Another example would be the infamous ZUN, who releases the Touhou games under the moniker "Team Shanghai Alice.") In Pixel's case, the appellation also emphasizes the extraordinary quality of Amaya's games, which anyone would believe were developed by a team of people if you told them. Referring to a single person as a "studio" may seem strange, but it's a hallmark of the culture that's grown up around the Japanese dōjin scene, where every release-be it a game, manga, music, or anything else-is attributed to a "circle" of creators who may in fact number only one or two. I love pixel art and old games in general! Please send inquiries to Blaster is the latest game by Daisuke Amaya, better known as Studio Pixel. Contributing author and lifelong Mega Driver. ![]()
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