I spotted this indirect area shooter over on a new blog called EngRish Games. (The blog is run by a chap who’s blogging when Japanese indie games are translated into English.) It took me a few moments to figure it out, but once I got into the rhythm of playing Nanosmiles proved to be whipped double fun. You move your ship around to pick up secondary drone ships and avoid the green-coloured bads. Holding Z creates an attack zone which freezes your drones in place as they shoot at whatever is in the area, turning it into a leafy explosion. Use the cursor keys for movement, but be careful as the level ends as you’ll cycle through the menu in an annoying fashion. That’s the only bad design in here though, from what I can see. It’s absorbing and clever.
At 13mb it’s less than a Peggle in size and a wonderful piece of shmuping. Get it from here.
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The Last Room level.
God. So frustratingly hard!
Awesome pixelly intro. Game’s not so bad either.
nabeel
Finished it! That last level was mean.
very interesting idea. no HEAVY BARREL option when you get like 5 shooter helper thingies though
How did you finish it?
I’ve been using the tactic of floating over one of my wing-men so they take all the flak and I constantly re-awaken them by being on top of them, but its quite difficult to stay directly over them.
Grab them both, head down, and try to make sure your first target is one that’ll drop an extra ship, do this till you have 3 or 4 then take out the spawner thing, and then cycle round the other corners. took about 50 attempts though
JohnG: That’s exactly the way I did it. You need luck and single-minded persistance to do it. Go down the bottom and take out the baddie that fire the homing bullets on the right hand side, grab the extra wingman and then chip away till you have 5 wingmen and take out the spawner thing. From there you should just b able to slowly chip away at the rest of the level, starting from the bottom and working your way up.
I love this game. I really do. I just wish there was more of it (haven’t beaten the last level yet). I love how you unlock songs as you progress, gives you more to look forward to. If it had more stuff i could see it on the DS or PSP, maybe with Lumines style skins and music unlocks? …Too bad that’s just wishful thinking.