Subluceo is a game by Ben Weitzman sponsored by Smiley Gamer. It’s another top down shooter in the asteroids style, except without asteroids, you know the sort of thing rotate round and blows lots of little crafts to smithereens. Fisrt impressions are that is all looks very retro, mainly geometric shapes and glows but it does look pretty slick. The background has a nice wobbly grid hich kind of reacts to where you are like its a sheet of water.

It reminds me very much of Luminara by jmtb02 in a fight between the 2 games it would be similar to a fight between Rocky and Rocky 2, they both have pretty much the same attributes except the first one was just slightly better. I’m not sure why, they are both pretty much the same game, a lot of the time its just how the game feels. Luminara is just a bit faster and feels a bit more manic, I also think the music in luminara is more to my taste. I also found that Subulceo is a little over the top in places with explosions and it does become difficult to work out what’s going on.

The last thing which Luminara wins on is the controls, mouse controls and firing really add to the sluggish feel of the controls. It works much better having keyboard controls as you can move and fire in different directions.

Having said that it is very slickly put together and is an enjoyable couple of minutes entertainment.

Go and Play subluceo.

Shift is a new game from Armor Games, at first you think its just quite a plain looking black and white platform game and for the first couple of levels it is just that. The usual platforms, get the keys, goto the door end of level and then it introduces the shift key.

Using Shift inverts the screen so the platforms become space and the space becomes platforms. Its a very clever game mechanic similar to the game Yin Yang by Nitrome. Shift works a lot better than Yin Yang though, the puzzles although taking a bit of time to get your head round aren’t that hard and its a really interesting concept very slicky put together. The excellent tutorial really eases you into the game and shows one gameplay concept at a time so by the time you do get the shift you know what you are doing, with Yin Yang even the first level was a bit confusing and took several attempts to work out what was actually going on.

Go and Play Shift from Armor Games.

Lt Fly and the spiders from above is the latest game by teravison games.

At its heart is a block based puzzler, you know the sort of thing blocks fall down and you have to create rows of similar blocks to make them vanish. This of the main gameplay as the great great grandson of Tetris. It has a slight twist on that theme though as between the coloured brick are bullets, which when they get to the bottom give you more ammo.

Seems a strange concept, why would you need ammo in a tetris game, well to the side of the block puzzle are where “the spiders from above” come down for every bullet you uncover you get ammo for your cannon to take out the spiders. The game ends when you run out of health.

It adds an interesting time pressure to solving the puzzle board and the game is really well balanced. It keeps you on your toes but isn’t enough to completely overwhelm you.

Presentation wise it looks the business, lovely cartoony sprites, real character and its all very slick, as you’d expect as teravison are not a 14 year old kid in his bedroom type of developer. The only thing which I found annoying is the music does get on your nerves a bit after a while. Overall though its a really neat job of taking an old concept and working new ideas into in.

Go play Ltfly and the spiders from above.