The year is 198X and professor Repeatski has just discovered the formula for time travel. Awesome! Probably. And hopefully unrelated to all of the crazy apocalyptic stuff that suddenly starts happening across time and space.

Luckily, you are the Super TIME Force, so time can rest easy knowing that you are there to fix/cause all of its problems.

So this game is amazing. It's fun, it's funny, it's delightfully pretty. And they've added a slew of awesome features for the ULTRA Steam release.

You definitely should own it. You definitely should play it.

I was lucky enough to meet some of the radical folks from Capy when the brought one of the game's early builds to PAX East, and got to watch it evolve over the course of the next two years until its XBLA release. The time spent polishing the game shows not just in the exquisite pixel art but the refinement of the incredibly tight, surprisingly strategic gameplay. There are so many wonderful layers to this game's mechanics.

At the surface, if you die (and you will - its all one-hit kills and designed to be hardcore) you can rewind to retry - however far back you feel like. As you very quickly begin understanding the interactions between the core characters and their unique abilities, you start to make decisions about who to respawn as and when, thus conserving lives, saving time, and powering up.

But as you dig deeper into how the collectables and powerups (the glorbs and hyper-slow-mo shards, carefully placed across each map) work, you realize that you have to be fairly tactical in their use. Killing an enemy carrying a glorb too soon may cause it to launch far ahead of you, requiring you to backtrack on the timeline to optimize, shave time, and try and reach that point sooner in order to catch it before it shatters on the ground. Activating a shard and granting yourself super-charged slow-mo too soon prevents you from being able to do so at any point later in time, in subsequent lives, so you may want to avoid it initially, turn it on later, die or time out, then activate it sooner and sooner on subsequent runs so that each life gets its benefits.

And then, if you're going for the speedrun secrets... you've got to reevaluate all of that.

All in all, STFU is a wonderfully hardcore, classic contra-style game with a time travel twist that is so much more than a gimmick and a deceptive amount of depth.