SHOOT THINGS
April 22, 2007 5:10 PM   Subscribe

SHOOT THINGS - a retro-arcade-style shooter for Mac OS X. The author's page describes how it was written in 3 weeks for a contest - it's entertained me for considerably longer than that.
posted by ikkyu2 (31 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Please download from the first link, not the second; bandwidth on mac.com personal pages is limited.
posted by ikkyu2 at 5:10 PM on April 22, 2007


This devolves into a post about gun control in 3... 2... 1....

;)
posted by iguanapolitico at 5:19 PM on April 22, 2007 [2 favorites]


I really don't know what to do with a .DMG file.
posted by Citizen Premier at 5:30 PM on April 22, 2007


You have to get out your Mac iBook and download it there. At least, that's what I have to do, and I did, and it's a good ol' fashioned retro arcade style shooter indeed. Me likey the retro games. But I'm sure having trouble getting used to the key commands.
posted by iguanapolitico at 5:33 PM on April 22, 2007


Woops. I guess I just glazed over the "Mac OS X "part. Now I guess I know what Mac users feel like most of the time!
posted by Citizen Premier at 5:36 PM on April 22, 2007 [1 favorite]


So, here's a question for those more knowledgable about OS X and BSD and Linux than I am:

Since OS X is essentially BSD with a dedicated window manager and windowing system, shouldn't it be relatively easy to take new Mac programs to BSD and thus pretty easy to take them to Linux so guys like me can enjoy? Or is there something huge (a Mac DirectX type thingie) that I'm missing?
posted by sotonohito at 5:38 PM on April 22, 2007


Now I guess I know what Mac users feel like most of the time!

What, you're going to run it anyway under parallels?
posted by pompomtom at 5:39 PM on April 22, 2007


Controls could be tighter. I personally enjoy the RaidenX flashgame for my old school shooter needs.
posted by yeloson at 5:40 PM on April 22, 2007 [1 favorite]


great game!
posted by about_time at 5:42 PM on April 22, 2007


This is a great game. Of the dozens of iDevGame entries over the years, the ones I still love to play include Kiki the Nano-Bot (3d puzzle game), Raptor (vertically-scrolling shooter), MAFFia (cartoony blow-em-up), and Black Shades (unique first-person-shooter).
posted by churl at 5:48 PM on April 22, 2007 [5 favorites]


This is an awesome, awesome game!!

(Actually, I have no idea since I'm running Lunix. I just wanted to fit in.)
posted by DU at 5:51 PM on April 22, 2007


Whoa, retro-irony in a video game done right? Awesome!!!!
posted by furtive at 5:52 PM on April 22, 2007


Since OS X is essentially BSD with a dedicated window manager and windowing system, shouldn't it be relatively easy to take new Mac programs to BSD and thus pretty easy to take them to Linux so guys like me can enjoy? Or is there something huge (a Mac DirectX type thingie) that I'm missing?

Sure, for games that are largely, say, C/C++ and OpenGL.

If you were writing a more standard desktop app for OS X, you'd probably be using Objective C and the Cocoa framework, and it would not be a straightforward port. You might also be using technologies like QuickTime, Core Audio, Core Image which don't exist in standard BSD. There's more to OS X than BSD + proprietary window manager.

posted by chrismear at 6:02 PM on April 22, 2007


Retro games were like that; didn't take all that long to build (especially if you had modern tools at your disposal) but could be entertaining for years. Nowadays it seems like the other way around.
posted by localroger at 6:10 PM on April 22, 2007


Oof, game is hard. If you screw up early, there's no way to recover. Rar!
posted by metaculpa at 6:26 PM on April 22, 2007


Yay. More guns. Yay.
posted by Dizzy at 7:56 PM on April 22, 2007


Holy crap. That's pretty slick. Thanks.
posted by veggieboy at 8:26 PM on April 22, 2007


ikkyu: Unfortunately, while your concern for the author's bandwidth is noble, the macupdate download link just redirects to the file on mac.com. Hopefully we don't kill this guy's site.
posted by infidelpants at 8:44 PM on April 22, 2007


It's a great game EXCEPT it seems to have a terrible bug that renders it unplayable after the first man!

At least on my machine, after my first man dies, all the remaining men don't seem to understand the forward/backward arrows... and worse, they fly right into the middle of the screen and simply die. Really annoying!
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:47 PM on April 22, 2007


I much enjoyed the link to antialiasing OpenGL, thanks.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:50 AM on April 23, 2007


SHOOT THINGS

Shoot! The collision detection is bad.

But despite that, shoot! This game is hard! i didn't get anywhere beyond the initial asteroid phase. Then I gave up.
posted by humblepigeon at 1:11 AM on April 23, 2007


Yeah, thinking of OS X as BSD plus window manager is going to lead you into error. Think of OS X as NeXTStep 5 plus Mac-centric proprietary libraries, and with PDF substituted for PostScript in the window manager. Then think of NeXTStep as BSD plus PostScript-based window manager plus NeXT-centric proprietary libraries (now known as Cocoa). Then you're on track.
posted by eritain at 2:55 AM on April 23, 2007


chrismear and eritain: Thanks. Its a shame though, I'd been assuming that it'd be easy enough to port Mac software that us Linux guys would see some titles coming our way via the Mac. Oh well...
posted by sotonohito at 3:42 AM on April 23, 2007


Yay. More guns. Yay.

Your despair is noted, but you do know that this is a spaceship game, don't you? This is about as much of an analogue for gun violence as Super Mario Brothers is for 9/11.
posted by psmealey at 4:35 AM on April 23, 2007


any cheat's only jokeing top post
posted by baker dave at 5:09 AM on April 23, 2007


Point taken.
My Martian friends are a bit jumpy, however.
posted by Dizzy at 5:25 AM on April 23, 2007


To be candid, dizzy, I had the same initial reaction when I saw the FPP title.
posted by psmealey at 6:30 AM on April 23, 2007


(yeah--"Shoot Things" seemed a bit Weekly World News to me...)
posted by Dizzy at 6:37 AM on April 23, 2007


This game isn't "hard," it's stupid. Instead of actually finding some creative way to make it difficult, the programmer just leaned on the old "level boss" trick of requiring multiple shots to destroy — except he applied it to every damn ship in the game. If you need to shoot the very first enemy several times before he's destroyed, it's a pretty good sign that the game lacks creativity.

Too bad, because I could use a good Mac version of R-Type or Defender. I love Starbase Defender, but it's not the same as flying around and blowing stuff up.
posted by cribcage at 8:27 AM on April 23, 2007 [1 favorite]


Cribcage then you might like AstroSquid, which I meant to link with the other iDevGames above.
posted by churl at 1:34 PM on April 23, 2007 [1 favorite]


Great game! Fun to play, and the retro graphics with modern explosions is slick.
posted by about_time at 7:34 PM on April 25, 2007


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