Mamotte Knight (Protect Me Knight).

A game on Xbox Live Indie games, produced by a company called Ancient.

Don’t know who Ancient are? let me fill you in… It’s a small, Tokyo based game development company, run by the Koshiro family. You might recognise the name of one of their top employees – Music composer Yuzo Koshiro. Yes… THAT Yuzo Koshiro.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or just aren’t that interested in specifics), Ancient were partially responsible for the Streets of Rage series, with Yuzo’s sister, Ayano, aiding in design and production. They also produced the Story of Thor/Beyond Oasis games.

They worked on a fair few games with Sega back in the day in fact, including Shenmue.

The best way to explain the game, is it’s a stupidly addictive, 4 player retro-styled cross between Gauntlet and a survival/defence game, all played very tongue in cheek with an awesome 8-bit stylee soundtrack.

It’s also worth looking at their website and comparing the Japanese version, and the “specially ruined for western audiences” version, styled like the packaging/instruction manuals of a bygone era.

Japanese version
Western version

Anyway, the game is 240 MS points. That’s 2 QUID in human moneys, assuming you’re buying 2100 points cards at the RRP of £17.50 (getting them straight from XBL is more expensive, but on the other hand there’s companies on the web that will digitally deliver the scratchcard codes for cheaper than RRP).

So if this in anyway grabs your goat, here’s a link to it’s marketplace page.

Link-me-do

It can also be found is you browse all Indie Games through your 360, but because it’s title is in Japanese, it’s right at the bottom of the list – Around 970 of 974, meaning unless we all spread the word around, this game will become tragically overlooked.