There's always bound to be a generational gap in what's considered a retro system. XBOX 360 is retro now, for people who had one when they were a kid. Personally I was already a defeated old fossil by then, and can't rightly think of it retro.
But fear not - I think we can all agree that the ZX81 counts. No colour, no sound, no memory to speak of. Obviously people are still making games for it in 2022.
Check this out :
Phwoar!
The rectangles move along their assigned edge, and fire the white squares at our protagonist, the dotty black and white square. (S)he has to collect the asterixs without getting hit. Points are scored as a result. It's a grand little design - the trick is to watch the 4 rectangles, and bait them into shooting along one line / column and then go get asterixs on another while they're reloading. With 4 or them to watch out for, all moving and firing independently, it's tough, but fair.
This is a conversion of 1983's Spectrum title Transversion, which is the same thing, but has colours, and features a spaceship. The spaceship has a name, the Elimax, and has a mission to eliminate alien pods from the galactic grid by passing over them with its Raydon field. Instead of rectangles firing squares, there are Guardians, firing Lazers and Blasters.
Look :
Question is - does that plot make things better or worse? With Lunares Insaneum, you can make up your own story. Maybe the square is a contestant on a dystopian future game show, scooping up credits to feed their irradiated many-legged family while dodging deadly boulders. Or it's a fish, gobbling up tasty plankton while dodging sharks. Or, you know. Come up with your own example. You can even go with Galactic Grid and the Raydon field, if you like.
Essentially, my proposition is that all games from now on should have an abstract mode, where everything's just geometric shapes, to encourage creativity in the youth. I look forward to GTA 6.
Meanwhile, you can get Lunares Insaniam here .
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