A Night at the Arcade: Aegis Wing

I think we can all agree that yesterday was a magical day of gaming goodness. The Halo 3 multiplayer beta was eventually made available to all registered testers, even for us lowly Crackdown owners. In addition, XBLA got the smackdown with two simultaneous releases. To top it all off, I succumbed to my insatiable curiosity (and a tempting $20 price tag) and picked up the original Xbox version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

Phew! Can you say "hectic"? But this post will not be my lukewarm review of The Beta nor will it be my impassioned tirade about publishing wildly dissimilar games under the same name and earmarking the crappier version for the 360. No, this little post is all about that free little gem, Aegis Wing.

My review to please your eyes after the jump...

So you've probably heard about the rags-to-riches story about the plucky trio of interns who approached the enigmatic and mighty J Allard about their dream of making... a 2-D side scroller?? Well, yes, Aegis Wing is the fruit of this inspirational project and although there may not be many riches involved (it's a free download), you can be certain these interns should not be worrying about wearing rags with this game as their portfolio piece.

The game play and presentation of Aegis Wing will be instantly familiar to anyone who has lived through the 8- and 16-bit era of video gaming. You pilot an agile aircraft through many hostile, techno-centric levels, blasting all manner of techno-organic creatures until the pulse-pounding denouement with a much larger, techno-organic Boss critter. There is a very masculine undercurrent to the early levels of the game, as I find myself pursued by red and blue oval pods with squiggly, sperm-like tails wiggly away. Some enemies try to collide with you, which results in an instant death. Many more simply spray you with unending waves of orange pellets that, on contact, deplete your force shields.

It's all very simplistic and retro. Fans of classics like Gradius and my personal favourite, Lifeforce, will be hit with fond memories, as well as finding the need to quickly dust off their twitch reflexes. I played through several levels by myself on Normal difficulty and found it to be a bit of a snooze. Even on Insane, the enemy bullets are quite easy to avoid and the repetitive avant-garde techno soundtrack does get drummed into your noggin sooner than you might like it to.

My second pass through doing co-op was a better experience. In an interesting wrinkle to the old formula, players can combine their ships together by getting close and pressing the "X" button. Whoever initiates the attachment becomes a multi-directional turret, while the attachee assumes navigational duties and retains their pee shooter primary weapon. As more players combine together, the slower the super ship gets, but in contrast, the larger your firepower. I never got a chance to form up 4 players together to try this, but I hear it's pretty sweet. This dynamic does place more emphasis on teamwork, as players consider when to combine or separate, as well as how to share and distribute power ups. In my co-op session last night, everyone was too damn independent to become just a turret on someone else's boat. To our credit, we still worked well together and played nice with the power up grabbing.

After all is said and done, I have to question myself as I am apt to do: Why is there a review for this game? It's free and the hard drive footprint is less than 50MB. What possible reason do you have for not trying it out for yourself?

Oh right. You're too busy playing Halo 3. (wink wink)