not all is Garbage in ''XNA''... looks in this game:
via:teambox
Talk about a dream come true: James Silva went from submitting a game to Microsoft’s Dream-Build-Play contest, to winning said contest, to having his XBLA title on Xbox Live Marketplace. Now, going under the name Ska Studios, James’ one-man operation is seeing the release of the award-winning The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai this week. Although some of you may have played The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai in various stages of its development, this version is the real-deal: complete Achievements, the required “how to play” instructions and a full 800 Microsoft Point asking price (or about $10). You even get local/Live multiplayer, a Horde-style Challenge arena and a straight-up points-based Arcade mode. You can play the trial version via Marketplace now, but the real question: Is Dead Samurai worth the amount of dead presidents required to purchase it? I know what some of you are thinking— Dishwasher is an indy project that probably should be kept in the community-games sector. While there may be some areas of Dead Samurai that need honing, it’s surely worthy of its XBLA publishing. It doesn’t take long to realize that The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is here to play hardball with the classic 2-D button mashers on XBLA. Just study the start screen for a bit: Plumes of black smoke ooze from the pointer. Ghost skulls and dreary, brush-stroked characters fill up the background. Even the font has been thought out, with O’s being replaced with Dishwasher’s unit of currency—the mesmerizing Spiral. Yeah, it’s just a title screen, but it illustrates that Ska Studios is really trying to create a memorable piece of intellectual property with The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, not just a generic hack-n-slash.
And on to the Story mode’s cutscenes. One has to be crafty in order to pull off cuts in small capacity titles, which is exactly what Ska did for Dead Samurai. Comic-book cells set slightly off-kilter create interesting reads. The cells scroll from left to right as if you were reading the pages of your favorite comic. There’s even a scrolling-speed control mapped to the face button for those that want to get on with the mashing. Some of the imagery in each cell is hard to make out, due to the overuse of like hues and a bit too much soft focus, but this push to try something different in the art-direction department won’t go unnoticed by artsy-fartsy Xbox’ers.
The dark-and-dank theme set forth by the start screen and opening cutscene carries directly into The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai’s gameplay. Backgrounds look like those CGI jobs used for the recent run of Frank Miller movies; drab to the point of them being depressing, and therefore perfect for a psychotic dishwasher that decides to go Kill Bill.
Once again, style abounds, whether in the subtle particle effects in the aforementioned backgrounds or the mesmerizing glimmer of the Dishwasher’s cleaver. Or the health meter, which purposely has some of its red juice oozing outside of the lines; as if it were plucked from the pages of a tot’s coloring book. The Washer’s animation sets are quite polished, too. He looks a bit like a character that Capcom forgot to put in Okami: kind of wispy with heavy brush-stroked lines. Ska did go a bit heavy on the lens Vaseline, but Dead Samurai is still quite buff in motion.
The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai plays well, too, but not quite as good as it looks. M-level gory details, such as copious amounts of blood (which can be turned from red to black—for the goth crowd, I take it), decapitations and general impalings raise the visual delights through the roof once again, but the act of making these messes in Dead Samurai can be quite frustrating at times.
There’s good gaming frustration and bad gaming frustration, with The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai exhibiting equals amounts of both. The satisfying, yet sometimes irritating, part of Dead Samurai’s gameplay is that it’s ferociously difficult. Yes, it’s a button masher for all intents and purposes, but The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai’s action goes well beyond the light- and heavy-strike buttons.
You can combo, grab and throw enemies, perform special attacks, aerial attacks, climb walls, juggle adversaries and carry two bad-ass weapons (including a chainsaw) at once. Such an arsenal will sometimes bias a game in the player character’s favor, but such isn’t the case in Dead Samurai because the enemy AI is more than up to the task. Go to the well one too many times with a devastating move and the AI will block it every time. Enemies also have automatic weapons in scenes where you don’t, and some even have the ability to fly much easier than the Dishwasher can. And, of course, there are multiples foes in every frame. Bottom line: Dead Samurai is Ninja Gaiden-hard on its Normal difficulty, and there are still three more tiers of hardness above that. It’s a toughie, for sure, and not for the faint of heart, but its complexity will keep the hardcore button mashers out there content.
game play:
Platform:
Xbox 360
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Publisher:
Microsoft
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Developer:
Ska Studios
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Genre:
Xbox Live Arcade
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Release Date:
4/1/2009
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Game Features:
Offline Players: 1-2
System Link
Cooperative
Online Multiplayer
Online Cooperative
Downloadable Content
Online Leaderboards
Online Voice Support
EDTV 480p Support
HDTV 720p Support
HDTV 1080i Support
Widescreen 16:9
Dolby 5.1 In-Game
Xbox 360 Exclusive.
well, not bad?..
''Halo reach''.. sell 7.m first week ,Believe¡¡¡¡¡¡
