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Thoughts: Nex Machina

Going to try including some video of the games I review now, and Nex Machina is a good place to start since screenshots don’t really do it justice. If nothing else I’ll eventually figure out how to upload in 1080p without Youtube mangling the encoding.

I really liked shoot ‘em ups back in the day. “The day” in this case being the period around 2002-2003, when I was just starting university and had no money and the plethora of free/abandonware shoot ‘em ups perfectly fit the requirements of a man on a non-existent budget. I got quite deep into games such as Raptor: Call Of The Shadows, screwball stuff like Every Extend, the great Tyrian 2000, and Best Shoot ‘Em Up Of All Time Cho Ren Sha 68k. (An Underdogs-sourced copy of Mr. Driller was another favourite of this period, if not quite fitting the description of “shoot ‘em up”.) That being the case, it’s possibly a little surprising that I haven’t really bothered with the genre in the fifteen years since. Partly this is my tastes changing over time — I’m less into being incredibly stressed for fun than I used to be — but mostly it’s because the most interesting games tended to be released on the Playstation. Yes, I know Steam has roughly one billion pixel shooters available, but there’s so many of those I basically view them as shovelware at this point1. If something was going to tempt me back into bullet hell again it would have to have some exceptional selling points behind it. As it turns out, Nex Machina has two.

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  1. Which is probably unfair to a lot of them, but there’s so much junk on Steam now that as a player I have to do this sort of ruthless triage to protect my time.
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