10-25-2010, 12:26 AM
Overview
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One of the finest space shoot'em ups I've ever played in terms of gameplay is a piece of freeware released over ten years ago by a long gone website. The game is Laser Age. Picture taking some of the coolest parts from other old-school vertical shoot'em ups like Phoenix (diversified enemies that have personalities as well as bosses) and Galaxian (HUGE armadas to fight through) as well as elements from horizontal shoot'em ups like Gradius (power ups and bosses that make you sweat). Now throw in some 24 bit graphics reminiscent of some of the better looking 16 bit era console games and up the chaos level a bit throwing in some serious bullet hell in the process and now you've got yourself Laser Age. One other thing that's interesting about this game outside of mixing in elements from different shoot'em sub genres is instead of giving a you a respawn and continue system, they instead allow your powerups to serve as health allowing you to take some damage at the expense of downgrading your ship until you eventually run out of powerups and get a game over.
Download (OMG HUGE 5.4 MEGABYTES)
http://www.acid-play.com/file/laserage_gold_20a.exe
Running it on a modern system
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WINE/PlayOnLinux
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WINE handles this pretty well, don't know what version to recommend since every one I tried handled it without an issue. Just make sure you set the compatibility to Windows 95 and make sure you run the game on one core.
Windows
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Don't know about 7 or Vista, but under XP SP1, SP2, or SP3 this game will run flawlessly when it is set to Windows 95 compatibility mode with the visual themes disabled and CPU affinity set to run the game on one core.
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One of the finest space shoot'em ups I've ever played in terms of gameplay is a piece of freeware released over ten years ago by a long gone website. The game is Laser Age. Picture taking some of the coolest parts from other old-school vertical shoot'em ups like Phoenix (diversified enemies that have personalities as well as bosses) and Galaxian (HUGE armadas to fight through) as well as elements from horizontal shoot'em ups like Gradius (power ups and bosses that make you sweat). Now throw in some 24 bit graphics reminiscent of some of the better looking 16 bit era console games and up the chaos level a bit throwing in some serious bullet hell in the process and now you've got yourself Laser Age. One other thing that's interesting about this game outside of mixing in elements from different shoot'em sub genres is instead of giving a you a respawn and continue system, they instead allow your powerups to serve as health allowing you to take some damage at the expense of downgrading your ship until you eventually run out of powerups and get a game over.
Download (OMG HUGE 5.4 MEGABYTES)
http://www.acid-play.com/file/laserage_gold_20a.exe
Running it on a modern system
-----------------------------
WINE/PlayOnLinux
------
WINE handles this pretty well, don't know what version to recommend since every one I tried handled it without an issue. Just make sure you set the compatibility to Windows 95 and make sure you run the game on one core.
Windows
------
Don't know about 7 or Vista, but under XP SP1, SP2, or SP3 this game will run flawlessly when it is set to Windows 95 compatibility mode with the visual themes disabled and CPU affinity set to run the game on one core.
ECKZBAWKZ HUGE LIST OF ACHIEVEMENTS GOES HERE....
Oh wait.
Oh wait.
