Super Rad Raygun, A Mega-Man Style Platformer Game For Linux
Super Rad Raygun is a direct toss back to the early days of gaming-- specifically the early Mega-Man games. You are Rad Raygun. The Soviets are attacking and causing problems, and for whatever reason, you are the only one who can stop it. So what do you do? You heroically stand on the President’s destroyed desk, turn on your arm-mounted blaster, and get ready to kick some Soviet butt.
You travel the world via a Super Mario-esque world map of inter-connected tubes, defeating communistic robots in platformer-based levels, as well as collecting “bits” and “batteries” that you use to upgrade your systems.
If you, like me, enjoy platformer games, then this is a very fun game. It reminds me of playing Mega-man on my GameBoy Color in the car on family trips, it reminds me of those ‘more simple’ days of gaming. But know what you are getting into: The music is done in the style of 8-bit, the colors are harsh, the jokes are corny, and the references could not be more in your face. To the point that one boss I fought had the name “Material Girl” during one play through, and the next playthrough she had the name “Mad Donna”. If you don’t mind the corny jokes, or in-your-face references, then this is (in my opinion) a solid game. The mechanics are some of the most time-tested in the industry, the level design is pretty good, and the jokes (while corny) do you make you laugh and shake your head. The developers knew they were making a in-your-face parody, and they ran with it.
That’s not to say, however, that everything is perfect, however. Playing this game on a keyboard is...painful to say the least. The game dialogue assumes you are using a controller at all times, so the hints will lie to you about what button to press. Figuring out what buttons to press requires trial and error, because while on an Xbox 360 controller you can press “start” to pull up the game’s menu, I couldn’t get any keyboard button to pull up the menu. Assuming you DO get into the menu system, there is an option to view (and change) the game’s controls. Or you could just play on an xbox 360 controller, as I did, and everything just works™.
The only other complaint that I have about this game is the color palettes. You have to play the game to unlock the non-default color palettes, and that could be quite painful if you hate the color palettes you get early on. Luckily for me, you unlock a red-and-black color palette after the first level that was much more enjoyable in my opinion.
How’s the Linux compatibility? On Fedora 25 with the NVIDIA graphics driver, I had zero problems. No crashes, no errors, no sound or graphical corruption, nothing except a well running game.
Super Rad Raygun is available on Steam for $9.99. Thank you to TRU FUN for supplying a Steam code to Phoronix for this game.
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