Sorcery Games is releasing “A Shooter” for Xbox Live Indie Games, and while the name sounds very uninteresting, the game looks quite the opposite.  In A Shooter, you pilot a ship and your goal is to shoot other ships, gain power-ups, and get major points for it.  If you are not amazed by that, there is something wrong with you.  The game looks intense.  It looks like a cross-between Galaga and Geometry Wars.  One thing that’s most appealing about the game is that it offers unlimited retries.  I can’t tell you how many times I’d get the double-ship on my last life in Galaga and then some douchebag would fly into me and ruin it just when I started to feel awesome.  Great, now I have to start the whole game over again.  Continue?  Hell no.  No more wasted quarters on you, Galaga.  But with the unlimited retries in A Shooter, this will be a chance for gamers to try again without feeling like such a failure.  Continue? Hell yes.  Also, when you get a power-up in the game it is PERMANENT.  I would have never lost my double-ship!  Galaga, you suck.

The game starts off at a very novice skill setting to introduce people who haven’t played side-shooters to the style.  As you beat levels and bosses, and as you upgrade your ship, the game starts to look like Geometry Wars (hopefully there isn’t a green ship that’s shaped like a diamond and the goal of its entire lifespan is to run away from your shots and then attack you when you least expect it).  The more you go about the game, the harder the difficulty gets, and the more enemies you will encounter until your screen is literally filled with cannon fire and space ships.  The game also has up to 4-play co-op, so you can party up with your friends and destroy the enemy ships who probably did nothing to you, and who also probably have a lovely wife-ship, and just the cutest baby-ship.  If you think you’re the best at destroying ships and causing baby-ships to lose their fathers, you may win some stuff for that.  Sorcery Games is also giving away prizes to the players with the top scores in the leader board.  This title looks interesting, and for 80 Microsoft Points, it looks well worth the price.  Time to make me some bastard ships.