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Fire Hawk :: News |
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The game I played most this week: Fire Hawk
Half A Maze: Fire Hawk
Fire Hawk is firmly in the tradition of Japanese shooters. Knowing that, I was expecting something bizarre, poorly conceived, and unplayable before loading the game up. But as I got into first level, I discovered that while Fire Hawk contributes its share of Japanese-style weirdness, it’s actually not that bad. You’ll notice that the game’s art has pictures of U.S. military aircraft. Don’t be misled, however; the game has about as much to do with military aircraft as it does luxury sports cars. The in-game graphics (menus and such) are a weird mix of 1960s psychedelic art, 1990s Japanese video game visuals, and fonts that look like they might’ve been pulled from 1980s video games. But once you get inside and start playing the levels, Fire Hawk reveals itself to be a pretty decent shooter. The level graphics borrow quite a bit from Sky Force/Sky Force Reloaded in that they have the mixed 2D/3D perspective with buildings that seem to rise from the ground and almost touch the player’s ship (in Fire Hawk, gun turrents are mounted on the buildings ala Zaxxon). While the visuals are a bit grainier than they are in Sky Force, the graphics are still pretty good and definitely superior to most of the other platform scrollers I’ve seen lately. Fire Hawk also has a neat visual effect that I don’t see much in these vertical scrollers: when you scroll to the left or right, in addition to the player’s ship moving, the entire screen moves just a little in the opposite direction. So when your player moves to the right, you see it moving across the screen, and the screen shifts a little bit to the left and really helps contribute to the illusion of movement (it actually made me a bit dizzy at first). The player also gets three different ships from which to choose. The level design isn’t too shabby, either, with good pacing and a constant flow of action that’ll allow you to appreciate the level graphics without getting too bogged down dodging enemy fire or grabbing power-ups. Sky Force feels like a little better quality overall, but Fire Hawk is a pretty good runner-up and definitely the game to pick up after you’ve finished the former.
News - Werner takes look at some Sierra Games Werner has released yet another in his line of seemingly endless “how-to” guides, this one focusing on playing the old Sierra games. He describes them as a company that has “published several games since 1978.” Actually, they were much more than that: they created and owned the adventure game category on the personal computer from the late 70s up to the early 90s. Their original studio in the California mountains created what most consider to be the best graphical non-RPG adventure games you could get back then, with an overall quality few other companies could match. It was a sad day back in 1998 when that studio finally shut down. In the guide, he focuses on running some of the early Sierra titles. Apparently there are several programs available to run those old games, each with various issues and tradeoffs (big surprise). I’m a purist and wouldn’t want to run the games on any platform that can’t recreate them exactly, but those of you aching for some nostalgia can check out the article here. |
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