Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved PC

Posted by oddbob on March 26, 2007 · Lovingly Filed Under Reviews 
Print this Article | Help us keep RR online

We're raising money for SpecialEffect. Please donate if you can.


Geometry Wars Retro Evolved Pic

Ok, so a little late to the party here but I’ve finally got round to picking up a copy of Geometry Wars for the PC and…

Well, its competant, its reasonably fun but it also feels really old. Which isn’t the greatest sign.

I guess the main problem is a matter of timing. When GW:RE landed upon XBLA it was very much something special, something different - the sort of thing that a twisted hardened gamer like me would truly appreciate. Heck, I bought Geometry Wars for the Xbox and got a free racing game - an upgrade as shiny and as sexy as GW:RE is a most welcome thing. Unfortunately, time has passed between the XBLA release and the PC version landing, too much time.

Whereas the minimalism of the original Geometry Wars gives it an almost timeless nature, sadly, GW:RE and its glow effects and warping grid action haven’t aged quite as well. What once seemed fresh and new now feels terribly, terribly dated in the PC incarnation - the game has suffered a most unfortunate fate (If you’re the creators at least. If you’re a gamer, man, we’ve got it good).

Its been superceded by freeware.

Geometry Wars PC Stuff Thing

I can’t say it saddens me to say that for all the furrory surrounding Mark Incitti’s Grid Wars 2 and a number of other alleged clones - the changes, additions and tangents that the myriad of twin stick arena glowy vector alikes have taken the Geometry Wars formula in, especially in the case of Grid Wars 2, make Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved feel like a curio. A museum piece. Good to hold and say “yes, thats what really kicked this glowy vector thing off again” but not so great an investment.

I can see why somebody somewhere felt that Grid Wars 2 needed to be taken down. In almost every possible respect - as a package, it shames the PC version of GW:RE. Little effort has been made to tailor GW:RE for the PC market. It stinks of shovelware of the first order. There’s little configurability, little in the way of options and precisely no incentive for a PC user to fork out their cash.

Instead of forcing Grid Wars 2 off the internet (in kind, of course) I fear the time might have been better spent adding value for money to the husk of a downloadable game that GW:RE PC is and making it a worthwhile purchase. Why stick with just the sequel? Would it have really been that hard to throw in a version of the original? Why so few options? Why is the package not actually being sold up? By downloadable game standards, you’d be hard pressed to find an Indie who’d see fit to release a game and ask for money for it with so little content. Yet someone, either at Bizarre or Microsoft figured that throwing a bare bones game out at an inflated cost and file size to the XBLA equivalent was fair game.

All told, a bit of a poor show all round and a release that goes nowhere near remedying the bullying tactics used to remove a suitably different game from the internet. No wonder they needed to “protect their investment”…

Tags:

Speak your brains

8 Responses to “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved PC”

  1. Richard Phipps on March 26th, 2007 4:41 pm

    Great piece Bob. I don’t have Windows Vista, so I’ve not tried GW.

    You may well be right that the glowly vector look may now be seen as looking a bit dated. That’s not ideal for me of course. But I’ve yet to see the ‘new look’ that will replace it.

    It’s a shame they have not tried to add anything new, or more options for the PC market though..

  2. Smayds on March 26th, 2007 6:31 pm

    That’s funny, I was SURE Bob had XP… He must have done the Vista downgrade then upgraded back to XP, because he’s still online…

    I’ve spent QUITE a bit of time playing the 360 version of GW:E this evening, in fact I’ve played it for damn near five hours straight. While it’s heaps of fun and looks ace on a 32″ widescreen telly, I can’t say the same about the PC version. It just… don’t feel right, man.

    Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by playing Grid Wars 2 so much? I mean, GW2 took the gameplay of GW and added quite a bit to it, not to mention slowed the whole thing down to a state where you can actually play for minutes at a time without getting your stupid ass killed. GW2, for me, has much, much, MUCH better gameplay - this coming from a true connoisseur :D

    I’d like to point out one hell of a visual annoyance I have with GW as well. The small swirly pink squares get lost so damn easily in the grid when there are lots of particles pinging about - which is about half the time :/ Too often I was doing just fine then blundered into a totally unseen enemy. Suxs. Maybe I’m just not hardcore enough? Maybe I just need to give it more time.

  3. Skelta on March 26th, 2007 11:22 pm

    Hehe, the “non-official” version of GW:RE does run on XP too…
    Since I don’t have a 360 I’ve never played it before and must say that while it’s fx-wise definitely more beautiful than Grid Wars 2 it’s also way to chaotic imho.
    From all the arena shooters I’ve played I definitely prefer ECHOES.
    http://www.binaryzoo.com/games/echoes/index.htm

  4. oddbob on March 27th, 2007 2:10 am

    I love the phrase “non official”, thats corking :-)

    One of the things that strikes me the most with GW:RE, as I was chatting to Smayds about early this morning, is how much the other versions and variants show a lot of the flaws of the original game up by actually “fixing” them.

    Its all very well throwing a mindblowing effect in your face but if it obscures crucial enemies in the way that GW:RE does then thats erring more towards unfair. More so when you’re spawning things directly under the player - which leans towards a game of chance as well as skill.

    I found it more tolerable in the original Geometry Wars, although still frustrating, as right from the off its a war of nerve and I guess, its a free hidden mini game. In offering the perception that GW:RE is more fair (despite actually being roughly the same) it lulls you into a bit of a false sense of security.

    Very few of the clones or variants don’t fix these issues - either by having a “no spawn zone” radius around the player or as with GW2’s selective use of it, and offering configurable effects puts the onus on the player to set them at a level where they don’t obscure the playfield and still look pleasing to the eye.

    GW:RE PC has none of these options. Its still a good, solid, competant and fun game despite all this, its just not what I expect to be forking over cash for with a PC game - especially one from a commercial studio trying to muscle into the downloadable games market.

    …and I’ve still not got round to giving Echoes a proper kicking about yet, really must do that when I’m not gawping at Veck2 and my own game in my spare time :-)

  5. Carnacki on March 27th, 2007 6:37 pm

    Very Nice Write Up Bob,
    I was a bit surprised that you ‘Vista’d’ already. I would like to do the GW:RE thingie, but would rather fork my money elsewhere than Vista. Why BizCre couldn’t/wouldn’t XP it is a mystery (why it must need the power of Vista to run of course!) Too Bad they couldn’t add more to the IP.

    Me, I have not tired of Glowing Arena Shooters by a long shot! Keep em coming!

  6. Smayds on March 28th, 2007 10:02 pm

    Well, seems it DOESN’T need the “power” of Vista to run, as removing the check for Vista from the code lets it go, without the scoreboard… I’m afraid it’s not that much of a mystery, to be honest. It’s more of a Microsoft. I mean, GW is the best-selling game in the XBLA, and let’s be honest, it’s loads more fun than most of the tosh in there, plus it’s only five bucks. Now, we all know that Vista is selling about as fast as bacon in Iran, so it makes quite a bit of sense to lock the PC version of GW to Vista. Sense, yes, but to most of the world, it makes you look like a cnut. “GW coming to PC! Oh, you’ll need Vista, of course” - Man, when you said GW was coming to the PC, I thought you meant that I’d be able to play it. What a waste of time the conversion turned out to be, then.

    The scoreboard functionality probably uses the Live Arcade bits in Vista, so I guess that was the problem too. Some very smart and very naughty person seems to be quite good at disassembling.

  7. oddbob on March 29th, 2007 2:48 am

    I’d throw a rough guess out there that GW:RE is a testbed for the entry into the market and we’ll probably see the next wave of “Games For Windows” with more intergration for the “Live on a PC” system.

    I’d also be willing to chance a guess that the original plan wasn’t targetted so much at Vista, hence the removal of Vista specific stuff being easily ripped out by the hackers. After all, if you’re used to bypassing a myriad of copy protection schemes then a few checks in the code is going to be nothing really.

    The curious part of me wonders at what stage the Vista intergration was added, of course. Just because I’m a nosy bastard, mind. Was it a case of from the offset or during the bouncing back and forth with MS about release? If its the former, then given how long this has been in development then I’d say its fair to assume that the exact details of how the live service will operate might not have been decided on, hence what we have now. If its the latter, then that heads more into the dubious lockdown tactics.

    Either way, I still don’t think its release excuses the takedown order, and I’m sure Lord Justice Jacobs or someone of his ilk would be stroking his chin at the tactics used.

  8. oddbob on March 29th, 2007 3:02 am

    There is, of course, also possibility #758 1/2 that the plan all along was to release for Vista but have a fallback to XP should, say, a certain company wish to release an “unplugged” bundle to the shops.

    You may well get away with a release early in Vista’s life being downloadable, but unless we’re talking a major title like, say, Alan Wake or ~insert your favourite DX10 thing here~ its not going to work on a shop floor at this stage - for a package of downloadable games all boxed up, it’d make sense to cover the non obsolete OS of XP *and* Vista to maximise sales.

    “Insert tag line about how previously available only to Vista users now available to you for £20 here”

    Of course, I’d say that it’d make sense to do that at the downloadable level as well, but shit me - I’m not in marketing so I’m not a clueless cunt ;)

Hello Reader! Perhaps you'd like to comment on this piece?.
As well as allowing you to type out your innermost and deepest thoughts about this piece, we've magiced up (well, installed a plugin) a fantastical ajax malarkey that lets you edit your post up to 15 minutes after you've posted it. Superb eh?