Level 2: The Virus Master is a fever dream retro shoot-em-up that assaults your senses from start to finish with a spectacular display of Giger-esqe pixel art, huge bosses and a rawkus metal soundtrack.
This is a promotional game for a band called ‘Last Chance to Reason‘ based on the tracks ‘Coded to fail‘ and ‘Taking Control‘ from their album titled ‘Level 2‘. This is an SHMUP with a twist: most of the actions are in sync with the music. The game will also feature lip sync animations on most of the boss characters. The animations for the lip syncs aren’t fully implemented, but you can press F10 if you’d like to see the placeholder animation.
Gameplay is inspired by classics such as R-Type, Contra, and Super Metroid, can be played on controller or mouse & Keyboard, and lasts for the length of 2 songs. There’s no fail state, but you’ll have to work really hard to get those ‘S’ Rankings. Gameplay syncs wonderfully to the music, elevating it into a fantastic (if slightly disturbing) audio/visual experience.
The game’s developer – John Bell – is very keen to hear any feedback, so feel free to leave comments below, or on the TIG forums.
UPDATE: This Alpha Is No Longer Available
Wow, this game rocks! Can’t really fault it audio/visually, but I’ve got a small (cool) bug report:
Not sure if this is on purpose or not, as it’s pretty cool, but if you’re playing the game and you press the right bumper button (360 controller), then you go back to the start screen and your character remains. If you start the game again, you then end up with 2 characters on-screen. You can do this as often as you like, getting an extra character each time! Weird & fun.
The game is awesome though! Are you planning on creating more levels?
Fun game for sure!
Two small bugs:
When fighting the boss at the end (not the master virus), my score went down to -1%
Also during the credits if you hold down the button to skip through, the count down timer goes into the negative numerical range.
Keep up the good work, i’d love to see more!
I think the -1% may be on purpose, the same thing happened to me. I think you lose 1% when you die. I died a LOT. :)
Hey, this is John Bell, developer of the game. Thanks for the feedback guys! I particularly like the right trigger button bug; I would of never found that on my own.
Having a score of -1 is intended: each time the player dies their score goes down by one.
Anyways, thanks again for the pointers guys! If you find any other bugs or have suggestions on how to make it better head on over to the TIGsource post http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40354.0