Game of the Day - Riot

Riot is a unique 3rd person, cross-hair shooter I recently discovered.  First the basics... Cut from the mold that gave us Rambo 3, you use the joystick to move your hero and aim the cross-hair at evil enemies and then use your fire button to kill them.  As is common in these games, you also have a button to roll quickly to evade fire or change directions.  Since the js controls the movement and aiming simultaneously, sometimes the roll is what you need to quickly change your aiming direction.

Now the punchline...  There are two fire buttons - one for the background and one for the foreground.  It is totally unique - as I can't think of a single other game that works exactly this way.  So, here's what I mean...  When you first start out, you are aiming and firing at guys on the screen as usual (the background).  There are power-ups you can get and other stuff to blow-up.  After you have gotten your feet wet, enemies start appearing in the foreground.  You are in the middle (3rd person) and didn't really realize there was gonna be crap in the foreground and then suddenly, you see the backs of guys heads (because they are looking at you in the mid-ground).  So, you aim/place the cross-hair on them and shoot.  But you have to do it with the foreground fire button to make sure your bullets head in the foreground direction instead of the background (normal) direction.  This is much easier to handle when all the enemies are either in the back or foreground, but once they are mixed together, it becomes much hairier to handle.  You have to recognize by the size, perspective and way they are facing whether they are fore or background.  Then aim at them, and fire the correct button.  Very cool and very unique.

In addition to the aforementioned power-ups, there are also the ubiquitous bosses.  But the bosses are magical.  What that means to you is that the battles with the bosses take place in weird areas (air, space, etc), so that the normal perspective becomes even harder to delineate.  When the boss's minions are floating at you from every direction and you are in mid-air, space or clouds, it's much more difficult to quickly determine which button to use to fire at them.

Graphics are fine, but not great.  However, some of the boss scenes are especially well done.  The first boss is in a quasi-stormy sky and the colors and lighting are fun to look at while you blast his magical zombie/golems.

Riot is very obscure.  There are almost no references to it on the web and KLOV does not even have an entry for it.  Go play it and help give it the fame it deserves.