Blue Wish Resurrection Plusx.x
PC (free)
One player only
x.x Game RoomAfter Toaplan (makers of fine games like
Batsugun and not-so-fine games like
Zero Wing) went bankrupt, its former employees continued to create shoot-'em-ups. Some of them founded Cave, the company responsible for such games as
DoDonPachi,
Dangun Feveron,
ESP Ra.De.,
DeathSmiles, and
Ketsui. Cave's vertical-scrolling games (that is, every game they've made aside from
ProGear and
DeathSmiles) follow a standardized "five stages, two loops, assload of medals" system that has come to be associated with the company. In the doujin shmup world, it is a commonly copied style due to its amazing versatility. One doujin developer, x.x, makes nothing but Cave-style games, though he keeps them to a single loop.
Blue Wish Resurrection Plus is x.x's most recent full release, a remake of the sequel to his original
Blue Wish.
Unlike most doujin games that follow the Cave style, x.x's games are easily playable and enjoyable by humans and shmup gods alike. His games include multiple difficulty settings and a very forgiving auto-guard. (Auto-guard is a [usually] optional feature of many newer shooting games where if the player would be killed, the game triggers a bomb to wipe out all bullets on screen and give the player a short invincibility period. Typically, auto-guard uses the player's entire bomb stock. However, x.x's games only use a single bomb when auto-guard is triggered.)
Blue Wish Resurrection Plus includes x.x's standard Heaven-Original-Hell difficulty selection, auto-guard, and an option to accelerate enemy bullets (which makes for a much harder game). Someone with some experience with the genre will likely blow through Heaven (and possibly Original) with acceleration off on their first credit. (Incidentally, there's a "true" final boss that can only be fought by playing through Hell difficulty with acceleration on using a single credit. Good luck.)
Players have a choice of four ships: Blue Wish (wide standard shot and compressed focused shot), Blue Hope (wavy standard shot and an unbroken laser beam for its focused shot), Blue Peace (straight standard shot and homing focused shot), and Eden's Edge (options which pull into the ship for a focused shot). By pressing the bomb button instead of the shot button to select a character, an alternate-color version of each ship can be chosen. For the first three ships, this means instead playing as Red Wish, Red Hope, and Red Peace, but in the case of Eden's Edge, the player ship becomes the girl from
Eden's Edge. There is no gameplay difference when using any of the alternate ships.
As with most shmups nowadays, the player has a very small hitbox that can be seen while using the focused shot (it's that small dot that appears on the ship). This allows for enemies to have bullet patterns that cover most of the screen but have tiny gaps for the ship to fly through.
Blue Wish Resurrection Plus has an interesting feature where if enough enemy bullets are on screen at once, the game will slow down (this is actually the game doing this and not performance issues, as evidenced by the framerate counter remaining at a constant 60 on my netbook - another great thing about this and many other doujin shmups is the fact that it has super-low requirements), allowing the player to more easily dodge bullets during more intense patterns. The number of enemy bullets that need to be on screen for this to happen varies with the difficulty and whether or not bullet acceleration is on.
As with most doujin shmups on PC,
Blue Wish Resurrection Plus allows players to save replays. Replay files can be shared with other players, and also act as demos when the game is left sitting at the title screen. Note that replays can't be saved if the game is paused even once. Here are a few of my replays (all with auto-guard on):
This is my best score for Original completion with acceleration off.Almost finished Original with acceleration on, but I completely screwed up in the last stage.Finished Heaven, acceleration off.Finished Heaven, acceleration on.Just put these in the replay folder and you're all set.
In conclusion,
Blue Wish Resurrection Plus is a really fun game that offers a challenge to players of any skill level. I don't advise messing with auto-guard until you've got everything memorized, though - it can get pretty brutal. I advise anyone who enjoys this to also check out
Eden's Edge, which is a bit less challenging, and its work-in-progress sequel
Eden's Aegis.
(Well, there's week one. I've talked about BWR+ a bit in the past, but I've expanded on it a lot more here. Later weeks will probably have some pictures, by the way. I just didn't want to put any in here. Feedback, your own replays, and other relevant posts would be appreciated.)