Gordian must defeat The Master if he his to ever see his new wife again, or enjoy a galaxy in which to spend their lives together. It's in the garbled backstory, the tale of newlywed space captains Gordian and Vanessa Gaiden separated by a mysterious planet lord known as The Master. This is a game that reaches back into the formative days of the video game medium not for inspiration that can then be subverted, as in mainstream indie hits like Braid and Fez, but for its very essence and vernacular. But the game's old school approach runs deeper than those areas where it's born from necessity. It's been years since Sega turned off its Dreamcast servers (for one thing, nobody owns a 56k modem to access them any more) so Gunlord's approach to online multiplayer is unavoidably basic. The game is more typical of a Mega Drive or Neo-Geo 2D shooter than a Dreamcast title, but the expanse and frame rate benefits from the system's 128-bit processor. You could easily add 'rifle' (through the attic) and 'curse' (the lost SCART cable) to that list, as many players will spend the first half hour trying to piece together the necessary technological artefacts to get the game up and running on Sega's 14-year-old Dreamcast hardware.īut that's all part of the arcane experience - alongside copying down 15-character codes from the Game Over screen for entry into a remote website-driven leaderboard, or creating maps of the game's labyrinthine levels on graph paper.

Explore.' Gunlord's German developer has taken the old maxim that any video game can be boiled down to its verbs of play and subtitled this, its latest release for a defunct platform, with three that define the experience.

Gunlord cdi