Hi! You might have read me telling you to play Zero Ranger across the forums. Now here is the official topic to tell you to play Zero Ranger.
Zero Ranger is a vertical shooter released for PCs last month. It is already one of my favorite GAMES. Not just shooters. GAMES. I want everyone to play it.
Please don’t look up a longplay or anything. The game is a constant reward of surprises and the unexpected. It is about your journey. It is your suicide mission (all shooters are suicide missions.)
The game is very generous. You gain continues and can start from any stage you have previously reached.
It is going to take me months to decompress enough to talk eloquently about it everything it does. Hinge Problems will have an episode out this week where we gush about how good it is gradually getting into more and more spoilers but we can’t help ourselves structurally because we are in love with this game.
I have been chasing enjoying a game this much for my whole life. Please play Zero Ranger.
I’m on the third stage, I don’t know what the heck the orbs are that you get at the end of each level but I grabbed the left one both times.
This game makes you feel bad at games. I guess that’s coming from the perspective of someone who doesn’t ordinarily play this type of game, though. I’ll soldier on! I have no idea WHAT the fuck is going on though. I selected ‘surrender’ at the beginning and can’t figure out how to go back and tell the game I’m kidding.
admitting itt that i never heard of this game before, saw the axe topic, have read more (SB) impressions since then, went from
‘must remember to get this’
to
‘must have’
to
‘well, right now my expectations would probably be too high because of all the praise’
… and to support the discussion of this game here, of course.
So, yeah, let’s see when i will get this.
They are extra weapons (press fire 2 and fire 3 to use). There are different ones on the left and right. Experiment to find the one that works for you, though they all are pretty good!
There was one episode that I managed to edit and upload about half an hour after we recorded it, while still talking to Rudie over Skype, but otherwise, you ain’t wrong at all.
Been thinking about this a lot and I appreciate the perspective. It has been a long while since a shooter grabbed me like this and I’ve bought…maybe 10 shooters this year. That I just keep thinking about playing it and wanting to play it again. The only other one I have spent any real time with this year is the arcade I play Mushihimesama Futari at.
It is getting clearer to me that maybe people do not have the inate vocation for the genre I have always seem to have had and there would be some benefit to well explaining what happens when I play a STG.
Maybe the sentax for it is very foreign in the modern game space and that’s why Jamestown was embraced because it mostly ignore that way of thinking.
I don’t know if I am just having trouble thinking of the word or thinking in Japanese 5 hours a day means I am only drawing up the Japanese words that would make me seem like an asshole if I used them.
It’s flow, isn’t it? The speed and incredibly dense amount of visual information you have to parse and the unfussy controls have always told me (someone who never got into shooters as a kid and now finds it like a foreign language) that it’s optimized to quickly induce unthinking play.
And I’ve felt it a few times in shooters and boy it is quite a feeling
When Dracko mentioned ZeroRanger, I looked the game up and learned from a 2009 thread elsewhere that it had been in development for years and was a Game Maker project. I impulse-bought it at that point, despite being a little wary that I might find it too difficult to be enjoyable and that the limited palette might make the levels feel similar and repetitive.
But I was soon glad that I had taken a chance on the game. It’s fair and full of variety. And the third level completely won me over.
One thing I haven’t yet figured out is why you’d ever want to transform. It’s a fun gimmick, but it seems to make the game a lot harder. Especially the first couple times when I thought it was permanent and didn’t realize that I could switch back at any time.
It is all but essential for certain fights. The end of stage 3 and stage 4 would be impossible without it. Let’s just say that there are a lot of advantages to that particular weapon.
The Type B ship makes it seem more useful and there are uses I haven’t fully persued yet with the Type C that might be a whole game of mechanics onto themselves.
I love this game, but I am finding the second round of levels to be a bit of a slog. They’re not as different from the first run as I want them to be. From folks’ ecstatic reactions later on down the line, I’m guessing the game goes to some cooler places after this.
i seem to have a loy of trouble with the fighter boss on stage 2, who i cant beat without a continue. the other spot is the skull boss, even with all of my continues maxed out i cant beat him at all.
i guess i’m not cut out for shmups after all, so i may just drop this. good production values thougjh
edit: i got past him, but the orange guy is next to impossible. i blew 7 continues on him in 10 minutes
WOOOOOOOOOOOO I just got through the second round of levels and that was AMAZING. That dream sequence level was worth the price of admission alone. I am constantly surprised and delighted by how innovative this game is, in such a stylish way.
I want to find this on a dirty old arcade cabinet in a smokey dim-lit bar and just get lost in it.