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Author Topic: Warp's Weekly Shmup  (Read 21333 times)

WarpRattler

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« Reply #30 on: October 12, 2009, 06:00:45 PM »
Torus Trooper, rRootage, TUMIKI Fighters
Kenta Cho
PC and Wii (see below)
One player only
ABA Games

Kenta Cho makes some pretty freaking awesome games, and all of them are free. I'll talk about a few of them here.

First up is Torus Trooper. Torus Trooper is a fast-paced tube shooter. Pretty simple, really - just survive as long as you can. You lose time if you get hit, and you gain it for hitting certain scores and for destroying certain large enemies that appear after you destroy a number of smaller enemies. Three difficulties. Great fun.

rRootage is a vertically-oriented boss rush. No, wait - it's 160 boss rushes. It has four games modes - normal mode (closest comparison is a Cave shooter - you're rewarded for not dying and not using bombs), PSY mode (based on aspects of Psyvariar's grazing system), IKA mode (based on Ikaruga's polarity system), and GW mode (based on Giga Wing's reflect force system) - all with forty separate stages of five bosses, each with different bullet patterns. Just try to score as well as you can within your selected mode's scoring system. Not too tough until you try some of the higher tiers, and loads of fun all around.

TUMIKI Fighters is what happens when you're inspired by Katamari Damacy when making a horizontally-scrolling shooting game. You play as a toy plane shooting down other toy planes. This is where the katamari mechanic comes into play: whenever you shoot an enemy plane down (or break off part of a larger enemy), you can pick it up by flying into it before it falls off the screen. This adds its firepower to yours and gives you more protection against enemy attacks (though each enemy or enemy piece, regardless of size, can only take one hit). You can draw the parts into your ship to protect them; your shot is locked into place (it's normally angled based on your vertical movement), you don't get the benefit of those pieces while they're drawn in, and you can't pick up more pieces, but they fly off into the air if you die instead of being broken with your ship. Aside from that neat quirk, it's a pretty standard shooting game. The Wii game Blast Works is based on TUMIKI Fighters, expanding on its concepts by implementing co-op play (for up to four players) and an incredibly powerful editor mode where you can create ships and custom stages (and share it all online). Blast Works also includes unlockable versions of TUMIKI Fighters, rRootage, Torus Trooper, and Gunroar.

WarpRattler

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« Reply #31 on: October 13, 2009, 10:45:27 PM »
Ketsui Death Label
Cave/Arika
DS
One player, two players in versus, two to eight players in Kizuna mode
Out of stock at Play-Asia!

Cave has a special naming structure set up for different versions of their games, all involving color labels except for the "Death Label" games. A Death Label title or mode is one that consists entirely of boss rushes. Ketsui Death Label consists of several arrangements of bosses and minibosses from Cave's 2002 arcade shooter Ketsui, with different levels of bullet pattern difficulty.

Ketsui Death Label is hard - like, Demon's Souls hard - but until you unlock the final boss rush, it's at least manageable. There's an autoguard system (strict here - you lose all your bombs when it activates regardless of how many you have - and it doesn't actually wipe the bullets from the screen, making the player fly over the now-purple bullets to wipe them before they activate again), levels can be unlocked through playing long enough in addition to earning them by finishing what you already have, and after a game over (either by clearing the mode or losing all lives), the starting number of lives increases by one (up to a maximum of twenty).

At the start, you have access to Novice and Normal, which are short, easy runs of a few bosses each, and Doom Mode, which consists of five battles in a row against Evaccaneer Doom, the standard game's final boss (each battle harder than the last, with more difficult versions of the attack patterns). (The starting lives in Doom Mode cannot be increased - you start with three lives every time, and each Doom you kill drops a 1UP icon. This is a serious challenge!) Surviving Normal unlocks Hard A, the first of three modes labeled such; finishing Hard C unlocks Very Hard (which is in fact very hard), finishing Very Hard unlocks the ridiculous Death Label mode (the hardest bullet patterns, and bullet colors are reversed, so what would normally be pink is blue and vice versa - very disorienting if you're used to looking for a certain color when dodging a pattern), and finishing Death Label unlocks Extra Mode, a remixed version of the arcade game's fifth stage (with the same rule for lives as Doom Mode).

There are also all sorts of bonus things! You can unlock "EVAC Reports," special images and videos of the bosses, by meeting certain requirements (from the mundane, like pressing the bomb button without any bombs in stock, to the insane, like missing a 1UP icon). Throughout regular play, you also unlock "Teach Me! IKD-san!!" videos, where IKD (the creator of the game) gives you tips and presents special gameplay videos. Ketsui Death Label also comes with a Ketsui "superplay" (a recording of a single-credit run through a game, usually with some obscenely good score) DVD.

There's also multiplayer! But it requires that everyone has a copy of the game. This game is almost a hundred dollars, remember, so unless your friends each spend the money for it or pirate it you're probably not going to play multiplayer, but I'm going to discuss the two modes for the sake of it. Versus mode has two players playing on separate screens trying to score high and not die against a barrage of popcorn enemies. Score better than your opponent and the bar goes up in your favor; if your opponent doesn't realize that there's a proximity system going on with the multiplier cubes, you're going to overtake them easily and win fast. The other multiplayer mode, Kizuna mode, is rather interesting in that it's not a standard co-op mode. The host selects a course and ship, and he and up to seven other players take turns playing. With no pauses between turns. You'd better hope everyone is at a proper skill level to handle whatever patterns they get to play through when their turn comes around. Ketsui Death Label also allows you to send a standalone copy of Doom Mode to another DS.

Ketsui Death Label is a great game on a system that doesn't have nearly enough shmups. Sadly, as much as I wish I could recommend it to everyone, the high pricetag means I can only recommend it to the rich and the pirates. If you fall into either of those groups, go get this game now!
« Last Edit: October 24, 2009, 10:56:10 AM by WarpRattler »

WarpRattler

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« Reply #32 on: October 14, 2009, 08:15:37 PM »
Twinkle Star Sprites
ADK
Arcade (MAME-compatible - requires Neo Geo BIOS), Sega Saturn
One to two players

Think of Twinkle Star Sprites as a puzzle shooter; that is, you've got to take out enemy patterns in a specific way to send over special enemies to your opponent. They can shoot these enemies to send them back at you, and this sort of chain can keep going for a bit. Think of it more specifically as a cute-'em-up version of Puyo Pop (already a cute game itself).

Here's the deal: I don't really like Twinkle Star Sprites. It's a fun game, sure, and you'd do well to play it if you saw it on a Neo Geo MVS unit somewhere. But to me, it feels like I can't play it as a shmup due to the puzzle aspects, I can't play it like a puzzle game because of the puzzle aspects being too weak to stand without the shmup, and I can't play it well even when I've got the mix figured out because of how random much of it seems and because the story mode is unfairly difficult far beyond the point of not being fun (the AI will rarely make mistakes, and never like the kind that a human would make, so the only way to beat it is to trap it by sending as much stuff to its side as possible - and that's while it's busy sending all sorts of garbage to your side). Some might find it fun, for sure, and I'm sure it's much better in multiplayer, but I just don't like it.

Glorb

  • Banned
« Reply #33 on: October 15, 2009, 02:05:57 PM »
When did this become Warp's Daily Shump?
every

WarpRattler

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« Reply #34 on: October 15, 2009, 05:54:40 PM »
Just for this week, to make up for last week's mostly-awful games. And now, a request from The Chef...

SolarStriker
Nintendo
Game Boy
One player only

SolarStriker is an incredibly basic yet very solid vertically-scrolling shooter. It's notable for being a Nintendo-developed shooter, since shmups aren't a genre they touched on often. It's a pretty easy game until you get to around the stage four boss, when the difficulty becomes closer to comparable shmups.

The game goes like this: shoot, shoot, don't die. SolarStriker doesn't do anything special - sure, it's got decent graphics, and it sounds nice, but at its heart it is the vertically-scrolling shooter stripped to its core. The game is incredibly simple, but it's also plenty fun.

It's also cheap and pretty easy to find. It's not competing with Tetris and Qix for Game Boy Cartridge I See Most Often, but I've seen it enough times to call it "common," and I picked up my copy for three bucks back when GameStop still carried Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. If you come across a copy, go ahead and pick it up - there aren't enough shmups on Nintendo handhelds, and a Nintendo-developed shmup is a pretty rare thing.

Radar Scope
Nintendo
Arcade (MAME-compatible)
One or two players alternating

Oh, here's another Nintendo-developed shooter.


Don't let that "grid" there fool you - this is a Galaxian clone.

Radar Scope was the first game Shigeru Miyamoto developed. It was somewhat popular in Japan for a time. It wasn't popular in the US at all, though, which is part of what led to the development of Donkey Kong. But this is about Radar Scope, not the game many of its units were converted to.


Doesn't the "grid" seem a bit dim here?

Radar Scope is a Galaxian clone. Enemies fly down from their neat little formation at the top of the screen to try to destroy the player ship. Aside from the odd angle, there are two things that set Radar Scope apart from Galaxian: the damage meter and the radar "grid." Enemies will drop decoys (with increasing frequency as the game progresses), and if the player doesn't destroy them before they hit the bottom of the screen, the damage meter goes down, causing the player to receive a lower end-of-level bonus and eventually weakening the blaster. With the "grid," if you shoot an enemy, the lower it is on the grid when it swoops down to attack, the more points the player receives for the kill. This risk-and-reward system is one of the few good things about Radar Scope. But there are so many bad things...



Examine the above picture. Do you see that dot just above the radar "grid" there on the left side of the screen? That's a player bullet about to dissipate, fired from the ship at its position in that picture (as far left as it'll go). You'll notice there's an enemy to the left of that bullet and many above it. You can't hit those enemies until they fly down - and enemies that exist outside of the player's shot range are just one of Radar Scope's many problems.

The game is full of poorly-translated text (which would remain a common feature of arcade games for some time), the sound effects aren't much of an improvement from Space Invaders (which was two years earlier), and it looks far more outdated today than other games from the same year. Even Radar Scope's Namco-developed predecessor seems to have aged better.

Go ahead and play Radar Scope if you really want to try everything Shigeru Miyamoto is responsible for, but I can't recommend it to anyone wanting to play a good game.
« Last Edit: October 15, 2009, 09:29:09 PM by WarpRattler »

WarpRattler

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« Reply #35 on: October 16, 2009, 03:23:55 PM »
Quarth
Konami
Arcade (MAME-compatible, requires the US release Block Zone as parent ROM), NES, Game Boy, MSX2, PC-98, DS (as part of a Japan-only Ganbare Goemon game)
One or two players (multiple modes)


It is the eighties and there is time for Quarth.

Quarth is a rather interesting puzzle shooter.


The story involves gravity breaking and causing these blocks that devour everything in their path to start heading for Earth. What the hell?

In Quarth, you fire blocks at other blocks to make bigger blocks that are then cleared away. Your goal is to make full rectangles (and sometimes also enclose rectangle-shaped space) without getting crushed.


Typical game of Quarth.

Clusters of blocks rain down, and your goal is to fill in those blocks so that they'll cease to be a threat to Earth. Every so often a silver block will appear; filling it in will clear the screen. You get one life to defend Earth. Good luck!


This is what it looks like when blocks are cleared.

The two-player modes include versus (when clearing multiple blocks as one, the cleared squares fill in from the top of the opponent's screen, making it harder for them to see), side-by-side independent play (just two players playing their own games at the same time on the same machine), and co-op (both players on the same screen, destroying the same blocks).

Overall, Quarth is a pretty neat game, and a puzzle shooter I enjoy a lot more than Twinkle Star Sprites (but not nearly as much as Ikaruga).

WarpRattler

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« Reply #36 on: October 17, 2009, 10:52:49 PM »
JiroSum
Fifth
PC
One player only
Download

Made by TMK's very own Fifth for a TIGSource competition and featuring TMK's very own TEM's "Two Parts Water" as background music, JiroSum is a math shooter.


That's a rotating plus sign attached to the front of Jiro.

In JiroSum, you play as Jiro, a fox riding atop a book, and destroy fish-bird-squirrel things with numbers on them. These things can be absorbed into the plus sign sitting in front of Jiro (up to an initial cap of ten units, raised through scoring well) or destroyed by firing the stored number out of the ship as a negative number. Any remainder from the subtraction attack will come back to haunt you, so watch out!

In short, go download JiroSum. Now possibly with an online scoreboard!
« Last Edit: October 18, 2009, 11:11:56 AM by WarpRattler »

Glorb

  • Banned
« Reply #37 on: October 18, 2009, 09:19:52 AM »
Actually, that looks mad fun. I'll check that out.
every

WarpRattler

  • Paid by the word
« Reply #38 on: October 18, 2009, 11:23:29 AM »
The game is insanely fun, and TEM's music is brilliant as always. Go play it!

(As a side note, Fifth placed fifth in that competition.)

Regular weekly shmup programming resumes later tonight tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.
« Last Edit: October 18, 2009, 09:44:05 PM by WarpRattler »

WarpRattler

  • Paid by the word
« Reply #39 on: October 19, 2009, 04:10:19 PM »
Bullet Candy Perfect
Charlie
PC
One player only
Purchase page with demo link

Bullet Candy Perfect is a remake of Charlie's moderately-successful Bullet Candy. As the story goes, the pricing of the original game was all over the place, starting at $20 and finally settling at the $4 it currently goes for on Steam after a few years. To avoid the nonsense this time, Charlie is letting you choose your own price for his game - anywhere from a dollar up.

The game itself is a simple arena shooter (for those not familiar with the concept, think Robotron 2084 or Geometry Wars) with one special trick: the suicide button. At any time, you may press the suicide button to destroy your ship, causing you to lose a life as normal, but preserving your multiplier and power-up status. This allows a good player to earn monster scores.

Also, there's an online leaderboard (for said monster scores, of course) and achievements. And a demo. And if you want the full game but feel like being really cheap, you can buy it for a buck. You really have no excuse to not try Bullet Candy Perfect.

(Tip: Use a controller with two analog sticks if you have one. Much better than using the keyboard.)

WarpRattler

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« Reply #40 on: October 25, 2009, 06:40:19 PM »
SPAC3 INVADERS EXTR3ME
Taito
DS, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade
One or two players (versus)

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Space Invaders, Taito created SPAC3 INVADERS EXTR3ME, dragging the series kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat twenty-first century. The basic gameplay is still present, but it's now enhanced with special weapons, a deep scoring system (including online leaderboards if you're not playing on the PSP), boss fights (multi-screen on the DS), Taito's standard branching level paths, and sound effects that integrate with the music.

The menu presents a clear picture of what to expect from the game - a woman announcing the game's title, an old-school-style font, and thumping music integrated with Space Invaders sound effects. There are several game modes - the standard game, which allows you to continue upon losing all ships; ranking mode, in which you can submit your single-credit score to the online leaderboards; stage select, which lets you play any single stage you've already finished; and multiplayer, both online and local, and with a practice mode against the AI. (There's also a cameo from another Taito character if you use one of the main menu commands...)

The basic gameplay, again, is still there: shoot everything until it dies. However, the new weapons - lasers, wide shots, explosive shots, and real man's shields - mean a much more interesting game, and new enemy types - large Invaders with various attack patterns, Invaders that start bouncing around the screen when you shoot them, UFOs with massive lasers, and more - mean a much more difficult game...and then you get into the scoring system.

By defeating four enemies of a single color (red, green, or blue), followed by four enemies of a separate color (also red, green, or blue), you'll trigger a rainbow UFO. Shoot it down to get sent to a bonus stage determined by your color combination. (You can also enter a bonus stage by shooting down a red UFO or by hitting the red enemy on the roulette, which is activated by shooting a gold UFO.) Complete the bonus stage to enter FEVER MODE and earn MASSIVE POINTS. As with most shmups that cater to scoring, it gets much deeper than this, and it's for that reason that I'm not going into depth on it.

SPAC3 INVADERS EXTR3ME is a great game, especially at its low price (it was $20 when it first came out, and it's now down to $10), but it's also kind of slow, the UI is kind of cluttered, and bonus rounds are jarring due to the transition from the regular game and having to switch from single-screen to dual-screen. These problems were alleviated in...

Space Invaders Extreme 2
Taito
DS
One or two players (versus)

"Nice moves, maverick!"

Take everything good about SPAC3 INVADERS EXTR3ME, take out a lot of the bad, change the scoring system ever so slightly, and keep the $20 pricetag, and you have Space Invaders Extreme 2. Also, it has a male announcer instead of a female one.

The game is a lot faster. There's a new time attack mode and a new beginner difficulty. Compatibility with the Japan-only Taito DS Paddle Controller is still present. Much of the UI has been rearranged. Other cool stuff.

Fever mode works differently. Meeting requirements for Fever Mode fills in a square matching the color combination used; three in a row activates Bingo Fever for even more points. Additionally, instead of being sent to a completely different area for bonus rounds, your score data on the top screen is replaced with special enemies, which you must destroy while still dealing with standard enemies; success will replace the top-screen stuff with the Fever stuff.

Just...go buy Space Invaders Extreme 2. Seriously.

WarpRattler

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« Reply #41 on: November 02, 2009, 12:06:57 AM »
Star Castle
Cinematronics
Arcade (MAME-compatible), Vectrex
One or two players alternating

Star Castle is a pretty neat (and incredibly simple) vector shoot-'em-up from 1980. The object is to destroy the floating fortress in the center of the screen, which is surrounded by three rotating rings. The fortress generates mines, will replenish rings if they are fully destroyed, and when a shot is lined up, will fire a large blast through an opening in the rings. Fun game, and a bit tricky.

Gravitron 2
Dark Castle Software
PC
One player only
Developer's page (also available through Steam)

Gravitron 2 is the sequel to an updated version of the arcade classic Gravitar. (The original Gravitron is free.) Unlike Gravitar, it's entirely stage-based and doesn't require you to deal with a gravity well when between stages. Otherwise: Destroy the generator and escape the planet! Mind your fuel and don't get hit! Only $5!
« Last Edit: November 02, 2009, 02:21:04 PM by WarpRattler »

WarpRattler

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« Reply #42 on: November 08, 2009, 11:38:40 AM »
Mikku Sumaruchipurai Supairaru STG
Artesneit
PC
One player only

WARNING! A LARGE BATTLESHIP "ALMOST HENTAI SHMUP" IS APPROACHING FAST! (This is why I decided to not include the link here. If one of the mods wants to see whether it'd be acceptable, I can give them the link.)

This is kind of a hard game to describe. It's a Vocaloid shmup. Play as Hatsune Miku or Kagamine Rin & Len (with Kaito & Meiko and Megurine Luka as unlockable characters). I have no idea what sort of plot there is (if in fact there really is a plot), but it somehow involves shooting clothes off of the bosses. Also, the enemies are pretty silly. Aside from all that, it's a pretty standard doujin shmup. Miku cancels bullets with her long hair and fires at different angles when you move left or right, and bullets slow down when you use her B-button move. Rin and Len fly as a pair, with the leader firing and the trailing character canceling bullets with a pulsating field (which can be activated on the lead character with the B button). Kaito & Meito both fire and both have hitboxes, and have no shield. Luka wields a powerful sword and has no shield. Collect soundpoints that drop when you kill enemies and cancel bullets. Earn (pitiful amounts of) money after each stage to buy stuff (you'll have to play through several times to unlock the gameplay advantages and the extra characters).

Overall a pretty fun game, and not impossibly hard like some doujin shmups.

TEM

  • THE SOVIET'S MOST DANGEROUS PUZZLE.
« Reply #43 on: November 10, 2009, 10:32:16 PM »
http://www.youtube.com/user/xoxak#p/u

This guy is like this thread, but it's videos and he's hilarious.
0000

WarpRattler

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« Reply #44 on: November 11, 2009, 10:26:26 AM »
Looks like he also has access to a Dreamcast and a 360, as well as the ability to actually import games. He also covers stuff other than shmups. Still cool, though, even if he hasn't done a video in six months.

He also seems to really love Mars Matrix. "Go play Mars Matrix."
« Last Edit: November 11, 2009, 11:52:08 AM by WarpRattler »

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