Pong and Beyond

361st played so far

Genre: Fighting
Platform: XBox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Ska Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

After the release of the list’s second edition, 20 games were removed, with twelve of them unplayed so far. For completeness and because we wanted to try some of them, we decided to still play these twelve, but with shorter or changed write-ups. Today the sixth game – The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai

I’ve been looking forward to playing The Dishwasher – in fact, it’s one of the games on the list that made me want to continue playing these. Not because I’m a big beat ’em up fan – while I enjoy them occasionally, Peter loves them more than I do – but because the concept of an undead (recently resurrected) violent dishwasher just sounds amazing.

In gameplay, a lot of it is the same kind of brawler you see in other games, loads of enemies, attack to defeat them, with some of them having special defenses, requiring different weapons and attacks. What makes that more interesting are the magical powers you get being a dead samurai dishwasher. Aside from running up the walls, you charge your magic energy to be unleashed for bigger attacks. There are a lot of different weapons to use (which we mostly used in the excellent multi-player arena), with clear different styles, making the game a lot more interesting that way.

As much as that made the game interesting, the really interesting part of the game is the art style. A simple handdrawn style (although still detailed enough to draw the attention) combines with a fairly monochrome look, using mostly browns and reds with any colours, enhanced by the amount of blood splattered in the game. It pulls you away from the action, in a way, allowing you to focus more on the combos and fighting instead as much on what is going on in the world.

What really wowed me about this game was the multi-player section. This is in part because the single player parts of the game gets really difficult really quickly but also because it is fun to compete with someone in the stakes of ‘how many more robots can I decapitate than you’. Whilst in some ways I do understand why a game like this was removed from the list to make way for new titles I think it would have made for a better game than some others (which I won’t mention) which maintained their place on the list.