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- Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#6]
Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#6]
🟧🟩🟪 Flavours of Destruction!!!
Igor Kolar
February 02, 2025
In another lackluster week for Epic’s free game of the week, I decided to delve into destructive tendencies, but with a creation-outlet at the end, perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
Rampage your way through 8-bit sprites! The oldest of the games presented here shows us ‘we’ tried this in 1988 already. | When acid, fire and ballistics aren’t just stats! Noita is a prime example of why we should support creators making their own engines… |
Rampage is a 1988 game for an astonishing number of systems. It is currently abandonware, and as such can be downloaded freely and for the most part legally, from myabandonware.com I would suggest the Sega Master System version, as it’ll be easiest to find and run an emulator for it (one some of you might already have 😉 ). Sprite based, and in 16 colours, it tries to create a satisfying feeling of tearing whole buildings apart with essentially furry baby kaiju.
Noita is one of those games you don’t need just a good idea for, but also a great programmer. While Unity, Unreal, and even Godot, are making headway in becoming the most accessible ways to get into and create games ever. Noita, a 2D platformer with destructible terrain whose pixel components react differently to various elements, shows what creativity in programming can do. Not convinced? It’s a 5 year old indie game still costs nearly 20$.
Teardown that wall! | Raze the old to rise the new, with fancy lights! MagicaVoxel is currently *the* go-to voxel painting program. |
Stepping up from Noita’s 2D pixel destrcution, Teardown is a new voxel-based game which gives you the ability to atomize everything in your path with a myriad of tools at your disposal in a way that only voxels can provide. While voxel technology has mostly been cordoned off in medicine, it keeps trying to make a comeback into games, not counting the one example everyone knows - Minecraft.
To finish things off, some creation is in order, and to that, I suggest trying out MagicaVoxel, a free, and open source voxel creation tool, with some really nice lighting. Used by the likes of madmaraca of instagram fame, just like with pixel art, you determine the level of your involvement with the ‘resolution’ you set, and the result can be absolutely astonishing. Voxels flesh out a lot more than just polygons, and are worth exploring for future gaming endeavours.
A how-to guide on burning 300,000$ in 20 hours:
In January 2014, over 7000 people in EVE online participated in an online skirmish so big that it received it’s own Wikipedia page, resulting in real life costs. It was the largest online battle to date.