Noitu Love

[Discoalucard]

www.hardcoregaming101.net/noitulove/noitulove.htm

I haven't played the first installment in this indie game series, but the second has some damn good pixel art, and an interesting control scheme which combines keyboard movement with mouse targetting, into the context of a Treasure-like game. It's being ported to WiiWare soon, too.

[Deleted]

Keyboard movement with mouse targeting, eh? Sounds like Abuse, except more diverse.

Nice write-up, Bobinator. I've heard about the series few times before, but maybe you got me interested enough to finally try them out (especially Noitu Love 2).

[Smithee of Zur-En-Arrh]

I really like these games. Good job.

[kal]

MP83 - It's a like Abuse spliced with Gunstar Heroes. It's bright, colour and a great effort.

[Snarboo]

This really is a great indie game series. I've only played through the first, but I've been meaning to buy the sequel forever and a half now after playing the awesome demo. I'm honestly curious what Golgoth is going to bring in the Wiiware port.

[jorpho]

I hope it gets picked up by Steam. Then I can wait for it to go on sale for two bucks.

[Gendo Ikari]

I think the first episode gets sometimes too much flack when compared with the sequel. Sure, the complaints about excessively long stages (the first one was even shortened from the initial release) and lack of variety in the action are valid (and I never liked the main character, honestly), and the higher difficulty levels, where the only change I noticed is small enemies taking more hits, makes them more aggravating. However the parts with the Evomatic and the bosses are totally worth playing, it's one of the few games I attempted to finish at all the difficulty levels. Play tip: Noitu can slow its fall after a jump if you continuously kick in the air, it was carried over to Xoda in the sequel.
The sequel was a surprise for how different and better it came out to be, Sandberg probably recycled at least some bits of Chalk's code and managed to build an action game based on close attacks with the controls you'd expect for a shooter. That the pacing was much tighter and more intense than before helps a lot. Pity that the Wild West stage (the robot train is one of the more evident homages to Treasure) can be played only with Xoda, the other two characters are a refreshing change but the game is even shorter with them.

Also check Sandberg's Legend of Princess, a small freeware Zelda homage built on Noitu 2's code. Latest releases from him were unfortunately canned projects (although Solar Plexus is nothing exceptional from the demo, and Mina of the Pirates is the game he abandoned years ago after spending a lot of time on it), I hope to see new full games from him in the future.

[syntheticgerbil]

I just wanted to say I've been playing the first one lately, only finished on Normal difficulty, but I'm pretty sure it only has 6 levels, not 7 as the article says.