A repost of one of my first ever Indie Fighting Game Thursday! This time, we’ll ride together into Beatdown Dungeon, an outlier to the “poor amount of single player content in fighting games” trope: The true and tried core of the game is a single player dungeon crawler through partially randomized floors, not unlike Shin Megami Tensei. And, when your character meets one of said monsters, instead of a turn based RPG battle, you have to vanquish them in a 1v1 fight. Join us in this crawl, accompanied by hand-drawn sprites and upbeat music!
Tag Archives: indie fighting game
Fighting Game Mysteries – The Laptop Arcade Player
This November, we might have stumbled upon one of the most cursed fighting game discoveries of 2021 — the Laptop Arcade Player, a portable arcade machine sold by LEHAWU on Amazon and Ali Express for 150USD and advertised as having 100+ games… among which, what seemed to be 2 completely original fighting games. Buckle up your belt and join me, GuileWinQuote, Ninjinister and MrMKL in this deep dive into the deep unknown of this not-at-all-cheap, obnoxious, obscure machine and the amazing discoveries that were made in the process!
Pocket Bravery (Demo)— from Brazil with a burning Heart
Pocket Bravery is an upcoming 2D pixel art fighting game developed by Statera Studio, an indie development team from Brazil. The game went through a rocky, ultimately unsuccessful Indiegogo campaign, but instead of giving up on it, the developers doubled down and decided to go on, against all the odds.
The game adopts a graphic style that can be seen as a compromise between the Neo Geo Pocket sprites and high resolution sprites, giving the characters a sort of “chibi” look.
Join us on this Indie Fighting Game Thursday and be ready to venture through this upcoming indie fighter, which is scheduled to have rollback netcode in the near future!
Heatwave — a pixel-perfect, Guilty-Gear-esque post-apocalyptic trip
Don’t get fooled by Heatwave’s apparent minimalism: at its core, this game is a legit-to-the-Angels air-dasher, with tight controls and tidal waves of combo freedom. Easy to pick, hard to master, and with three different fighting styles, this game offers options for everybody. Join us in this trip to a post-apocalyptic flooded Earth as we dissect the mechanics of this 20-pixels-tall air-dasher and what makes it tick!
Deep Doujin Dive - FateAxis 2 ~ The Fragment
It’s time for inaugurating a subsection of my Indie Fighting Game Thursday series: Deep Doujin Dive, in which we delve into obscure, rare or not very well known Japanese indie fighting games and review their mechanics, aesthetic and appeal. To kickstart the series, we begin with FateAxis 2 ~ The Fragment, a game by Rokusujio!
2D Fighter Maker 2002 — The Lost World (Part 2)
Welcome back to Indie Fighting Game Thursday, with the second part of my double feature about the living legacy of 2D Fighter Maker 2002! Last week, we talked with Border Violation Taisei, the studio behind Angels of Battle v1.5, with an in-depth interview. I have asked similar questions to two developers who are still using 2DFM02 for developing their games — Ulissan Game Dev and らぐはちさん：南東ライトグリーン８(Light Green Eight)!
Now, brace yourself, because it’s time to dive deep into Brazil and back to Japan to see how this old engine does still have a spot in the recent game development history!
2D Fighter Maker 2002 — The Lost World (Part 1)
In a previous article of mine, we have gone through the history and alternate fortunes of a prehistoric game engine that is STILL getting used as of today by a multitude of developers: the immortal 2D Fighter Maker 2002, also called 2D Fighter Maker 2nd. Since then, I have got in touch with some developers who are currently using this living fossil of an engine for developing their games, and also tracked down a couple more games that happened to use that engine and went “under the radar” for a reason or another. Angels of Battle, despite having been released only in August 2021, is older than one might expect, topping a 15 years long development! But I’d better let the two developers behind it (Tomay and WWolf) tell the story in greater detail!
ROBO OH - NES-like, pixel-sized, giant robot mayhem
The NES era gave us some very rough, early attempts at porting fighting games to home consoles, including precursors like Ye Are Kung Fu, cancelled versions of the original Street Fighter, and extreme bootleg experiences like an unlicensed Street Fighter 2 conversion. While that would be rectified by the Super Nintendo in the following generation, the aesthetic of those earlier attempts at cooking colorful settings with just a bunch of pixels is not completely lost. For today’s indie fighting game, we go back in time, while steadily moving forward, thanks to the 8-bit-era-inspired fighting game ROBO OH, by Foxy Boxy Games!
Ultra Fight Da! Kyanta 2 — The hero we didn’t deserve
Ultra Fight Da! Kyanta 2 is a chaotic team fighter from Japan, with loads of weird mechanics and a unique, hand drawn, charm! It’s available on Steam for free and is still in active development. Today we will delve on what makes it interesting and what this game offers for new players and veterans alike. After reading this article, you will look at the words “Boko Bar” with new eyes.