These are some screen shots from our Dream Build Play 2010 entry, Merge Error: The Blast Buggies. It’s a retro styled arcade shooter with updated HD graphics and a cool twist on gameplay. You can view the trailer at the end of this post.
Blast Buggies may be one of the most fun retro games never made.
When we say retro you might be thinking “Sure, another vector geometry wars thing.” Thankfully you’d be way off the mark. We moved forward in time a bit from that to the era of pixels. Pixel art in HD with retro 16 color palettes but with full pixel shader normal mapping, lighting effects and distortion for a unique collision of old and new. Nothing else looks quite like it.
Gameplay wise this game is retro too, but not any old retro game you know and love, or any old retro game you know and hate for that matter. We did something a bit new, that feels retro.
In this game you play a buggy, on a space construction site, usually in zero gravity. Hey, don’t panic. You have magnetic wheels so you can stick to the floor, or for that matter the walls or even the roof. That’s nice yeah? But wouldn’t it be cool if you had a jump thruster so you could jump through space from platform to platform. Yes. It would be. Which is exactly why you have one.
In Merge Error: The Blast Buggies that’s what you do. You drive and jump from platform to platform through space and blast enemies in all directions with your mounted turret. Did we forget to mention your buggy has a huge gun on it? Well it does and what’s more there are ten different weapons to find and blow things up with, from miniguns to nukes.
So drive, jump and blast you way through 40 levels in this retro, non retro, platform, non platform shooter… and watch out for gravity cause it shows up in some levels just to kill you. Its mean like that…but not as mean as reactors because they actively want to kill you and have lots of guns to do it with.
View the trailer
Fast Tube by Casper