E3 impressions: LUFTRAUSER on Vita

[soupbones]

Not sure if a lot of forum members here attended this year's E3 - but if you did, I hope you checked out LUFTRAUSER on the PS Vita... because it's fucking awesome.

The PS Vita had a TON of games at E3, all of which were fantastic, but I think Luftrauser left me the most impressed. I think I spent a half hour playing it the first time - checking out all the weapons, armor and perk combinations. Then was fixated on taking out the battleship in the demo level, which proved to be a good challenge.

All throughout the show, I kept stopping by to play it some more - the game had a great feel to it, and seeing how long you could last was part of the challenge. I tried finding the dev, but he always seemed to be missing from the game station.

REALLY looking forward to seeing this come out on Vita -

Some brief details:
It controls like Asteroids - with directions mapped to the d-pad, and thrust mapped to the R trigger. The sense of gravity is perfect, and the control was spot on.

Not firing for a while will repair your ship - the speed of your repairs depend on what kind of loadout you set up before starting the game.

The aesthetic is great - sort of a lo-fi, monochromatic design sense going on - with some nice character designs used in the menus.

Could not really comment on the sound - the headphones looked sort of ...wet, and as I much as I loved the game, I wasn't about to place those headphones on my ears.

My only complaint was the way the menu controls - which was REALLY weird. Pressing up to launch the game (instead of hitting a button) seemed to throw a lot of people off. Not a big complaint, but worth mentioning.


Trailer:
http://www.playerattack.com/file/42772/ ... 3-trailer/


In related news, apparently the dev's code was stolen at the hotel nearby to the convention center. Hopefully the thieves get hit by a bus and dragged to their deaths.

http://www.bluesnews.com/s/142502/luftr ... ode-stolen


Anyone else get to play this at the show?

[ptoing]

I know the guys who are doing this and am betatesting the PC version. It's very good fun.
And I doubt it will be very expensive for the PC or other platforms either, so well worth getting it.

The soundtracks are not unique for all the 125 planes. Basically you got 3 parts for your plane: Gun, Body, Engine.
Each of those 3 things has a part of the music track, like Gun being the percussion, and body the melody or something. And then each of the 5 available variants for each part has a different version of the respective part of the track. So in essence it is 3 times 5 parts of a single theme, which will sound different depending which parts it is made from. Very clever, and the musician did a really good job of it.

[Udderdude]

I played the original flash version and wasn't too impressed .. seems like the "Full version" is more of the same. Just too much random enemy bullet spam going on.

[ptoing]

Given, this is not like your normal shmup, and there are random elements. But the feeling of controlling your fighter, doing loops around enemies and shooting them down is very satisfying. I doubt it is for everyone, but it's good fun. Also I actually think there is not too much random going on in terms of how enemies spawn. Not sure. I'll have to ask JW.

[soupbones]

I played the original flash version and wasn't too impressed .. seems like the "Full version" is more of the same. Just too much random enemy bullet spam going on.

That's actually what I loved about it - really tests your reaction skills as opposed to your memorization skills.

Definitely not for everyone - but everyone should give it a try.

[ptoing]

If it's about being right on the internet for you, fine by me. Have some e-penis.

[ptoing]

Really though. It is basically one song, which has 3 parts. And each of the 3 parts has 5 arranges. And those get mixed up. It is pretty different from being 125 real different songs. But that does not matter, because it works very well and some of the results are very awesome.

[ptoing]

I played the late builds quite a bit, and some of the ships are clearly better than others, tho some of the weaker ones pose nice challenges. And they also tried to balance it as good as they can. And most of the planes feel quite different, because some engines need different control strategies and different guns and bodies require different attack/evasion strategies as well. Figuring out a nice combo which suits you really is a lot of fun.

[ptoing]

I can totally understand that though. I guess the only thing that comes kinda close to this in terms of trad STGs is R-Type Final with its 101 ships. But let's be honest, most of those are there just for laughs and play like total crud. And would DDP benefit from having more than 3 ships and 2 shot modifiers? Not really.

It all depends on the kind of game you are making. I mean let's face it, in most purely score based STGs with loads of ships, most people end up using the same bunch of ships. I would rather have fewer, more balanced ships, than shitloads which are not balanced at all. Though again, when it comes to single player score stuff balancing is not as important anyway, as long as you have separate leaderboards, imo.

Also it is a matter of testing a lot too. Very time consuming.

[ptoing]

I mean time consuming on the devs end. Which ultimately is also a money question.

[Laurel_McFang]

Game releases March 18th 2014

[murquiel]

Knowing the track record of app games on tablet and mobile right now, please be vigilant for plagiarized versions of Luftrauser on android and itunes.