TimeWasters highlights many of the excellent, free Web-based/lightweight downloadable titles that you can dive into within the space of a lunch break. This week, Laurie-Anne Vazquez explores The 8-bit Expendables.
If you haven’t heard of The Expendables and you grew up in the 80s, take a gander at the trailer. It’s everything that was awesome about 80s action movies–overstated muscles, explosions, bad one-liners–crammed into one (hopefully) glorious ass-kicking fest. To celebrate that awesomeness, the movie’s Facebook fan page features an 8-bit game based on the movies, which is as badass as the premise of the movie, right down to the chiptunes soundtrack.
The 8-bit Expendables is, essentially, a re-skinned Contra – the same backgrounds, same style of bad guys (with different colored clothes), and same power ups (with red or blue skulls in the wings instead of letters). After a screen crawl informing you of your mission (“A team of elite mercenaries head to South America on a mission to overthrow the evil dictator”) you pick your character and are dumped into a jungle that looks exactly like the first level of Konami’s run-and-gun shooter.
You can play on Easy (as Jet Li’s character “Yin Yang”), Medium (as Jason Statham’s “Lee Christmas”), or Hard (as Stallone’s “Barney Ross”). There’s a Bonus Round for extra difficulty, and if you beat that and score in the top 10 you win Expendables-related stuff. Each character has their own weapon, power-ups, and arsenal of moves to keep things interesting.
Yin Yang uses throwing stars and he was a pain in the neck to control; his jump took me all over the screen and I could never get my feet under me. Lee Christmas, thankfully, felt more grounded, and he had the lion’s share of power-ups, as well as easy to control throwing knives. Shooting enemies with Barney Ross felt exactly like Contra, even though he was incredibly slow.
The red skull power-up gave Yin Yang giant red boomerang stars, triple knives to Lee Christmas, and red machine gun-fire to Barney Ross. The blue skull gave everyone a bubble of invisibility that was actually useful. You have 6 lives to use and infinite continues (there’s even an 8-bit version of your character with a flower on his chest on the continue screen when you kick it). 8-bit Expendables has a lot of play for a Facebook game, so much more so than fluff like Farmville.
What more you could you want from an 80s-style game based on an 80s-style movie? Maybe a sequel featuring the full cast of characters.
