The digital delights of Sony’s scrumptious PlayStation Network service know no bounds. Aside from letting punters compete in online gaming, stream films, browse the Internet and more, its premier attraction rests in the copious supply of downloadable games ripe for the picking. From PSN exclusives to PSOne Classics, minis and plain old add-on content, Sony’s online space is chock full of goodies battling it out for your hard-earned digital dollars.
Welcome back to another installment of Inside PlayStation Network, where every Monday – Friday we’ll pluck a PSN release—be it new or old—and put it in the spotlight for a thorough dissection. Fancy getting a new PSN game but don’t know what one to plump for? Perhaps this feature will help. Didn’t realize that a game was available in your region until now? We’ve got you covered. Or, perhaps you were musing over what those lucky Japanese folk were tucking into over in the Land of the Rising Sun? You can be sure our coverage will extend to those rare regional exclusives as much as those firmly embedded on the public consciousness.
For our latest entry, we take a butcher’s at the deceptively named Everyday Shooter.
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Developer: Queasy Games
Region(s) available: North America, Europe
Players: 1
Crafted solely by a talented chap by the name of Jonathan Mak, Everyday Shooter is, despite its name, not quite your rudimentary blast-em-up. Initially spotted by Sony at the 2007 Independent Gaming Festival, the game offers an invigorating twist on the familiar Robotron-template that every man and his dog seems intent on replicating in this day and age. The game distinguishes itself from its contemporaries, however, thanks to its ear-assaulting homebrew score, striking art direction and meaty difficulty level.
The game’s stripped-back aesthetics are immediately evident from the get-go, from the bare necessities of the menu system to the visual representation of your craft and enemies – namely, a bunch of coloured dots. From here, the game’s dual-analogue blaster sensibilities come into play as you shoot down wave after wave of nondescript, pint-sized enemies. However, Everyday Shooter does a bang up job of putting a spin on the average Robotron clone in its execution of point gathering.
Nope, blasting foes isn’t just the only way of netting a high score. The game also tasks you with hovering up pixels dropped by certain enemy types, which is directly tied to a diverse chaining system. Each stage is different in this respect. One level might have you shooting an object that creates an ever-expanding black mass, reducing any enemy that collides with it into a max of pixels. Other times you may find yourself engaging in even more obscure challenges such as blasting a giant eye and its accompanying spherical-shaped foes.
Bagging pixels doesn’t just add to your score, however. They also function as currency used for Everyday Shooter’s unlock mode, allowing you to obtain a heap of goodies such as extra lives and additional stages for the solo campaign. There’s also a couple of swanky visual filters thrown in for good measure, too. Needless to say, this substantially elongates the blaster’s replay value, as you seek to rake in more points to unlock heaps more content. Conspicuous by its absence is an online leaderboard, though, a surprising omission given the fact Everyday Shooter is perfectly tailored for such functionality. Still, for a game cobbled together by one bloke all on his lonesome, Everyday Shooter is quite the accomplishment.
Join us again tomorrow for another look Inside PlayStation Network.