For a certain subset of angry gamers planted behind their keyboards, March 18 was just another day in the digital outrage mines.
07.03.2024 - 14:09 / digitaltrends.com / Giovanni Colantonio
You know that it’s a busy year for gaming when a project by an industry legend launches with hardly any fanfare. That’s exactly what happened in February 2023 with Akka Arrh. Created by Jeff Minter and his eccentric studio Llamasoft, the neon-tinted shooter is a remake of a 1982 Atari game that never saw the light of day after being deemed too difficult. Minter got the greenlight to revive the project, bringing it to life as a retro arcade shooter built in his unmistakable style.
While the project was exciting for game historians, it didn’t exactly crack into the mainstream (it only has 37 user reviews on Steam). Thankfully, Akka Arrh getting a second chance to shine this week as its new PlayStation 5 version adds PlayStation VR2 support. While that might not be enough to make it a commercial hit, it does give PSVR2 owners a good reason to dust off their headset and check out a delightfully oddball project from one of gaming’s true visionaries.
AkkaArrh is the rare example of a game that might be easier to explain on paper than in practice. In this throwback arcade shooter, players control a stationary ship that’s tasked with protecting pods from attacking aliens. To fend off foes, players drop bombs that blow up in a different geometric pattern on each level’s map. Every time an enemy touches that blast radius, it blows up in the same pattern, chaining to other enemies. The goal is to keep an uninterrupted chain going as long as possible by using a limited number of bullets to knock out foes that can’t be destroyed by bombs and grabbing power-ups by hovering the cursor over them.
RelatedLike a lot of Llamasoft’s games, Akka Arrh is rule-bending title that can be a lot to take in. It features an overwhelming retro art style, full of flashing neon lights and stray particles. While its gameplay sounds easy enough on paper, its made more complex with mounting systems that pile on through its 50 levels. Its chaotic UI is a mess of numbers, gameplay prompts, and gags (when I get a big combo, a bit of text at the top tells me I’ve achieved a “Jesus and Mary Chain”). This is all to say, its a Jeff Minter game.
That’s not a knock against it, though Akka Arrh will make a lot more sense to anyone who is familiar with Llamasoft’s prolific output. It neatly fits into the lineage of classic Minter games, from the genre experimentation of Gridrunner and Tempest 2000 to the trippy light spectacle of Colourspace. Its most notable parallel is with 1986’s Iridis Alpha, a Commodore 64 shooter that had
For a certain subset of angry gamers planted behind their keyboards, March 18 was just another day in the digital outrage mines.
If you’ve been playing PC games for a number of years, you’ve probably heard the term ‘VSync’ tossed around once or twice. Maybe you’ve also heard of G-Sync and FreeSync. For those unaware, VSync is actually short for ‘vertical synchronization’. This is a display feature that is designed to keep your gaming screen running in sync with your computer’s GPU. VSync isn’t just important for PC gaming, but it’s one of the most important criteria that goes into a good gaming display.
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