Lately, I have been enjoying playing a game from four years ago with a very retro feel named Gatlin Gears. It's a beautiful game which is rendered from a nice 3D top down perspective.
While this title does have a story its mostly irrelevant. This one is really just about dodging bullets and raining down loads of lead on the various baddies and big bosses.
Anyone who read my article on Limbo, enjoyed a title like Shadow Complex or who occasionally reminisces about those early days in the arcade will likely connect with this game.
However, today I am not really writing about a game. My topic today is on innovation. Playing this title got me thinking about how simple the premise of the game really is but yet how successful it turned out.
There is nothing revolutionary here and the developers didn't even invent a new genre. Instead, what they did was nail the mechanics while rolling up nicely all the concepts from other successful precursor games in the category into this one release. Nevertheless, the result was great and as it turns out people can really still have a ton fun even in 2015 only by walking up and down the screen and side scrolling for hours just to blow shit up.
So as I end this piece and you head to back to your daily activities just remember that sometimes all it takes to do something exceptional is to simply to take another look at the current model, turn it upside down and have fun blowing @#!% up.
Apple didn't invent a single new technology when it created the iphone but it was disobedient and it didn't follow the current mole. It didn't create a shape, nah, it took the existing rubik's cube turned it around and changed its colours.
And as we are in a retro mode, let's take a moment to remember exactly how that moment felt.
Written by
Nneko Branche.