By John Walker on November 23rd, 2011 at 3:38 pm.
You may remember Cadenza Interactive from Sol Survivor, the tower defense game that captured Jim’s attention last year. They’ve recently announced their second game, Retrovirus. It is, they say, “a modern take on the classic six degrees of freedom shooter”, made only on PC. Ooh, like Descent? we asked when Jim spotted it last week. The moving pictures below help to explain.
Well, no they don’t really. I lied. I lied to you to make you click, to give us one more page impression. It’s a completely meaningless teaser that shows a ship floating about a bit. Which is a bit rubbish, really. But because we liked their last game, we’re still interested in their next. Also, we’re interested in more Descent.
It’s currently in the pre-Alpha stages, which I think is around about the point you think of the idea in the shower. However, they plan to blog the entire process of the development, so you’ll be able to keep an eye on when they start writing stuff down on paper and so on.
I wonder if they’ll dare to tell the truth about the development process in their blog.
“Week 7 without progress. The nights draw in and we huddle around our monitors for heat. Lead Programmer Oates says he’s just going to get a new keyboard; he may be some time. Our playtester is screeching in foul tongues. The art team has submitted their latest progress as interpretive custard-dance. Our servers are now under three feet of water. I hear the drums in the dark. THEY ARE COMINNnnnnnnnn…….___”
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Looks like you pilot a little drone rather than a big fancy ship.
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Albeit possibly inside a big fancy ship.
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Hmm. Perhaps a matryoshka ship.
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I want to see more.
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I never actually played Descent. HORROR.
However, I did play, and adored Forsaken on the N64, which I believe was very much in the same vein of gameplay style.
So colours me interested in this.
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Yeah forsakens very similar, either way there’s not been anything in this style for many years…
I suppose Shattered Horizon is the closest.
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Oh, awesome, a sequel to inner space!
Huh what? It has nothing to do with 2d spaceships shooting viruses? Damn.
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Finally a sequel to Microcosm.
Oh, wait.
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Sol Survivor was OK, but made me wish for more Defense Grid levels instead.
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Descent eh?
Does this mean ferreting around my electro-junk box for my old analogue joystick?
Good.
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I loved, loved, loved Descent. This might be that rare action game that actually drags me back to the genre.
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LOOKS LIKE PORTAL LOOKS LIKE PORTAL LOOKS LIKE PORTAL
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Looks heavily inspired by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game to me – that was a Descent clone that used your own computers file/folder structure to battle a ‘virus’ infecting your own PC. When inside certain file types the game could parse (certain text, image and sound formats) they would be rendered/corrupted in-game in their respective rooms.
Naturally the goal was to eliminate the virus from your PC, and a failure state was the virus infecting C:\Windows\system32.
It was a bit ambitious in the day, but hopefully Cadenza can pull it off!
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