Duailty ZF: Sky Stage 5 featuring Dual Play: One player controlling two figthers simultaneously.

Happy New Year!  Duality ZF, our award winning shmup, has been featured over 100 times in the media!  110 times to be exact, at the time of this writing.  Our press coverage page links back to all review sites that covered us.  Congratulations to Wasted Seconds for taking the 100th spot with an insane write-up of our insane game, properly titled, Duality ZF Insanity!  We won't quote the whole article, but it starts off, "Now, I don’t normally curse a lot in these types of posts, but this is different..."!

Throughout all these previews, Duality ZF has been compared to some of the best shmups, ever:

Duality ZF looks like Raiden on Red Bull - richardhutnik (link)

Geometry Wars Killer - Kris Hemeon, unofficial Duality ZF beta-tester, private conversation*

It’s 1941 on crack, fast forward a few hundred years - irsocal (link)

We even got a mention in tweets from Gulti Games, developers of 0 day Attack on Earth (Xbox), Raiden Fighter Aces (Xbox), and Space Invaders Extreme (PSP): 6923509930, 6923455598, 6923419246, 6794367798, ... Also, a few of the developers at Gulti Games were also developers on the original Raiden arcade games.  Just, wow!

Amazing comments and recognition for a small indie team.  Please let us know what you think.

*It's important to note that our comparison to Geometry Wars was before we showcased our multidirectional control mode to our beta testers.  The comment came shortly after Kris Hemeon played our new Survival mode, a one-life, see-how-long-you-can-last pure hell mode.  Here's a March 2009 tech demo of Survival mode.  It was the intensity of the gameplay, the instant kill deaths, the high score running, and things of that nature that made the comparison to Geometry Wars.  Our game is fast paced and exciting.  But, Duality ZF is not a dual-stick arena shmup; No game that "kills" Geometry Wars will be one.  You can never out-do your competition by doing what they've already done, you have to do something different.  Geometry Wars has done arena shooters best.  You cannot beat them at their own game.  Also, Geometry Wars was not, and will not be, on our radar in terms of inspiration towards Duality ZF.  If we had to pick a few, the Raiden and Thunder Force series would surely stand out.

Don't Miss:

If you have not seen it already, please check out some Duality ZF Boss Rush gameplay.  And watch out for our next shmup, Decimation X, coming soon!

More Xona.com Links:

• Duality ZF: official developer site.
• CBC News: TV, radio, website.
• Duality ZF Dream Build Play 2009 Finalist (2nd in Canada, 7th in the world)
• Interviews: Xona Games, Duality ZF.
• Duality ZF Promo Materials

External Links:

• Duality ZF: official game site, forums (xbox.com).
• Xona Games social: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and more.
• Xona Games subscriptions: RSS, Twitter. 
• Dream Build Play (Microsoft XNA Game Studio Contest)
• Xbox LIVE Indie Games* (forums)
• Wasted Seconds
• Gulti Games  (twitter)

*Xbox LIVE Indie Games formerly known as Xbox LIVE Community Games.

About the Author:  I am Matthew Doucette of Xona Games, an award-winning, team-of-two indie studio concentrating on "intense retro" games (Xbox LIVE, PSN, WiiWare, and Windows PC). We've released Decimation X (XBLIG), a 1-4 player shmup, #1 best selling and #1 top rated XBLIG in Japan. We're working on Duality ZF (XBLA), a groundbreaking 1-4 player shmup, which placed #1 in Canada and #5 in the world in Microsoft's Dream Build Play 2010 contest. It features dual play, the ability to control two fighters at once, and a massively upgradable 32-stage spread/laser weapon system. 4 player dual play allows up to eight fighters at once.  Many of these features are never before seen shoot'em up firsts. Both games feature beautiful electronic Imphenzia soundtracks.  Help spread the word with our official dualityzf.com and decimationx.com websites.

P.S. Watch out for Score Rush (official website scorerush.com), another 1-4 player shmup. Coming soon to XBLIG.

*Shmup also known as: shoot'em up, 2D shooter, scrolling shooter, space shooter, spaceship shooter, retro shooter, etc.