Warp's Weekly Shmup

[WarpRattler]

To try to enlighten some of you guys to some wonderful games of my favorite genre (as I often do in many other threads), I'm starting this thread.

Each week I'll talk about a different shoot-'em-up.
Sometimes it'll be a classic arcade game.
Sometimes it'll be a rare and/or expensive console game.
Sometimes it'll be a PC STG.

About the only thing I can guarantee is that for obvious reasons, there will be no hentai shmups or anything else that would go against the rules of the forums. As such, I will not post links to ROMs or to sites that carry them. With PC shmups, if the game is available for free or cannot be easily purchased by English speakers, I will post a link to a download of the full version; otherwise, I'll post a link to the demo version along with a purchase link.

I'll also place a link to each week's article in this post.

Week One: Blue Wish Resurrection Plus
Week Two: Gyruss
Week Three: Flash Attack
Week Three And A Half: Zero Wing
Week Four, Part One: Kingdom Hearts II's Gummi Ships
Week Four, Part Two: Kenta Cho
Week Four, Part Three: Ketsui Death Label
Week Four, Part Four: Twinkle Star Sprites
Week Four, Part Five: Two Nintendo-Developed Shmups
Week Four, Part Six: Quarth
Week Four, Part Seven: JiroSum
Week Five: Bullet Candy Perfect
Week Six: SPAC3 INVADERS EXTR3ME and Space Invaders Extreme 2
Week Seven: Quickie Vector Games
Week Eight: Mikku Sumaruchipurai Supairaru STG
DOS Week, Part One: Outer Ridge
DOS Week, Part Two: Galactix
DOS Week, Part Three: Major Stryker
DOS Week, Part Four: Xatax
DOX Week, Part Five: Raptor: Call of the Shadows

[CrossEyed7]

There are hentai shmups?

[WarpRattler]

Quite a few of them. The sad thing is that some of them play really well, but their chances of being well-known are basically ruined by the fact that they have hentai images as cutscenes.

[Glorb]

No, the sad thing is that they have hentai images as cutscenes.

Anyway, I think this is a cool thread idea. Also, I had no idea that you liked shmups, Warp.

[The Chef]

He's named after the ship from Gradius. :|

[WarpRattler]

Blue Wish Resurrection Plus
x.x
PC (free)
One player only
x.x Game Room

After 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.)

[bobman37]

Ummm... Is it just me, or did Warp totally rip Glorb's thread idea and change it to shoot-em-ups?

[WarpRattler]

As such, I will totally steal Warp's idea

[Glorb]

bobman, have I ever told you I love you?

[WarpRattler]

Your love is unwarranted. As most of us know, bobman has a disorder that causes him to not notice times and dates, leading him to believe things happened earlier or later than they actually did.

[coolkid]

You must do Zero Wing next for great justi- *shot*

But seriously, do Zero Wing next. Not because the memes, because I heard it was quite difficult.

[WarpRattler]

I was actually planning on doing one of these on Zero Wing at some point. Not because of the memes (which aren't in the arcade version) or because it's difficult, but because it's a blatant ripoff of basically every successful horizontal-scrolling shoot-'em-up that came before it.

Not next, though. The next one is going to be of one of my favorite Konami shoot-'em-ups, one that a few people here hate but I love. Possibly Zero Wing for October 4th (more on what's going on with that tomorrow).

[WarpRattler]

Gyruss
Konami
Arcade (MAME-compatible), NES, GBA, Xbox Live Arcade, and others
1-2 players (alternating)

Gyruss is...well, Gyruss is kind of hard to categorize. The best way to describe it is Galaga meets Tempest.


Why would I deposit a coin when it's on free play?

In Gyruss, the player's goal is to travel to Earth. In some versions, a small amount of backstory - about the pilot having to fight his way through invading aliens to return home, or something like that - is given. The player starts two warps - stages - away from Neptune.


Pluto isn't a planet in the arcade version. It is one in the NES version.

The game plays very much like Galaga, with waves of ships flying in and settling at a fixed point away from the ship, and sometimes leaving stragglers to collide into the player. The point of view is similar to Tempest - the player sits at the top of a "tube," looking in. They can move their ship around the tube.


Planetomically correct!

Upon reaching a planet, a bonus stage will begin. These are ripped straight out of Galaga: forty enemies, bonus for each wave fully destroyed, one hundred times the number of enemies destroyed for the point bonus at the end, 10,000 point bonus for destroying them all. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."


Lots of destruction going on...

The three ports listed above vary in a few ways. The NES port, considered by some to be the definitive version of the game, contains more stages, more weaponry, boss fights, and other extra stuff. The GBA compilation Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced includes Gyruss (as well as Frogger, Time Pilot, Scramble, Rush'n Attack, and Yie Ar Kung-Fu). Entering the Konami code at the title screen of each game will unlock a special bonus, which could be enhanced graphics, extra player options, and/or bonus levels. Inputting the Konami code at the Gyruss title screen will start the game at a special set of "black hole" stages, with the player having four extra lives to start instead of two. These stages are brutal, but the player is rewarded with a permanent dual-shot (and four stages worth of extra points) if they survive. The XBLA version has an optional "enhanced" graphics mode, leaderboards, a lame multiplayer mode, and Achievements.


This is what I got when I was playing to get these screenshots. Not hard to beat.

Gyruss is my favorite non-standard Konami shooting game. Simple gameplay, not too difficult, and loads of fun. Great audio, too - possibly the most memorable part of the game is the extensive use of a synth version of the beginning of Bach's Toccata and Fugue.

(Pretty cheap game, too - obviously you could emulate it in MAME for free, but if you want to pay for it, the XBLA version is 400 MS Points, and Arcade Advanced is only $4 used at GameStop. I don't know what pricing looks like on the NES version, unfortunately - ask Chupperson, or wait for a possible Virtual Console release.)

Fun fact: the guy who made this also made Time Pilot, and after being fired from Konami, he went on to make 1942 and Street Fighter.

[Chupperson Weird]

Where I work I think it's about $3 on NES. We sell Arcade Advanced for more than $4 though, so the pricing isn't exactly relative.
Definitely worth that $3 though.

[Glorb]

Aw hellz yeah, Gyruss is where it's at.

[WarpRattler]

Hey, Chup, think if I could get TEM to mail you that three dollars I won in his drawing contest ages ago, you could mail me a copy of NES Gyruss? I don't know how much shipping would be on an NES cartridge, but...

I just realized that we can't add polls to existing threads on this forum software, so: Which should I write on next week, Zero Wing or a Flash attack involving Robot Dinosaurs Who Shoot Beams When They Roar and Upgrade Complete?

[Glorb]

The second one. Zero Wing is actually kind of boring to play.

[WarpRattler]

(I've played and finished all three of the games I mentioned there at some point or another.)

[Chupperson Weird]

If we have a copy in stock right now, sure (we probably do).

[CrossEyed7]

That reminds me, I don't think TEM ever gave me my money.

Actually, I know he didn't, but I felt like phrasing it in a less direct way so as not to sound confrontational.

[Glorb]

omg tem are a cheapskate

[WarpRattler]

Two days left for voting!

Some shmup (semi-)news:

Play-Asia has restocked Ketsui Death Label, which I'll be covering in a future week. Yes, that's almost $95 (after shipping) for a DS game. No, I didn't pay that for it, nor do I expect you guys to do so. Like Soma Bringer, this is a case where piracy is the logical choice unless you're a serious collector (by which I mean the kind of collector who buys arcade boards).

Cave recently announced that the Xbox 360 version of Mushihime-sama Futari will not be region-locked. This will be the first time a region-exclusive retail title on the Xbox 360 is fully import-friendly. They are also looking into potentially bringing some of their games to download services in the West, which would be kicked off with a US XBLA release of Guwange (already going to hit Japanese XBLA, so anyone who wants to make a Japanese Silver account can go ahead and buy it on there when it comes out).

Apparently the 360 version of Raiden IV came out in the US less than a month ago!

EDIT: You guys should all pay at least a dollar for Bullet Candy Perfect.

[WarpRattler]

Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar
Tom Brien
PC (Flash)
One player only
Kongregate link

Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar is the most EXTREME single-level Flash shmup ever. Players choose either Tyrannosaurus X or Dinomite, the titular robot dinosaurs that shoot beams when they roar. Tyrannosaurus X shoots a straight red beam, while Dinomite uses a wavy blue beam; there is no gameplay difference. The game is controlled with the mouse, and is a straightforward horizontal-scrolling shmup. What you're really playing this for, though, isn't the gameplay, but rather the roars. Every time you click to fire, your dinosaur lets out a roar (to be the catalyst for the beam, of course). These vary from a deafening blast to a pitiful groan.

Robot Dinosaurs is a gag game, to be sure, but it's a very successful one, and very DINO-TASTIC!. Be sure to stick around after the credits.

Upgrade Complete
Armor Games
PC (Flash)
One player only
Kongregate link

You must buy this review.
YES (You must upgrade your decision-making power to choose NO.)

Upgrade Complete is a Flash shmup in the spirit of the acclaimed Achievement Unlocked. Instead of being a statement about the achievement-riddled games so many people love to play (myself included), though, it's about purchasing upgrades. Everything can be bought and/or upgraded. Upgrade the graphics. Buy the audio. Buy the mute button for said audio. Buy weapons for your ship and upgrade those weapons. Buy the preloader so you can actually play the game. Buy the credits. Buy the achievements menu.

The main game is a rudimentary keyboard-controlled vertical shmup in which every enemy must be destroyed to advance to the next wave. Obviously, though, the only reason to play the game itself is to get money so you can upgrade more stuff, right?

Unfortunately, this game's message isn't as effective as that of Achievement Unlocked for two reasons. One, it tells you bluntly, "maybe you should worry more about whether you're having fun playing the game than if the upgrades are cool," which kind of defeats the purpose of building a game around a mechanic to spoof said mechanic. Two, upgrades aren't as much a problem as achievements. Obviously upgrades are overdone and old hat - whether they're purchased upgrades, as in Tyrian or Space Siege, or discovered upgrades, as in Metroid or most arcade shmups - but they're not a scourge on video games the way some people think achievements are.

Still, Upgrade Complete is a pretty fun little timewaster.

[WarpRattler]

Zero Wing
Toaplan
Arcade (MAME-compatible)/Megadrive (Europe/Japan only)
1-2 players (alternating)

Yeah, Zero Wing...this is about the arcade version, so no memes here. Unfortunately for the game, the memes are the most memorable part - the rest is a forgettable horizontal shmup that completely steals many of its ideas from other horizontal shmups and doesn't even do that right. The one thing it has going for it - the tractor beam - is useless in most situations and even a hindrance if used in some sections.

Now, you've got power-up items. Speed-up (standard), a bomb that sits on the front of your ship to be fired with the tractor beam button, and red, blue, and green weapons. When you first grab one of those color-coded weapon items, you get two bullet-absorbing, enemy-damaging, weapon-firing options above and below your ZIG fighter. But once you start comparing the three weapons, things start to look bad. The red weapon (a wide shot-type gun after being upgraded) does not fire if you hold down the attack button. This means that to use the red weapon, you must either tap the button furiously or use autofire (the latter is recommended if you do attempt to play this game). The same applies for the green weapon (homing missiles which do fire if you hold down the button, but not as fast as if you tap or use autofire). On the other hand, the blue weapon (a straight laser) inexplicably fires more quickly if you hold down the attack button than if you tap.

Here's something else about the red weapon:



Notice the shot pattern here? Typically a wide-shot weapon doesn't leave the center completely open like that, and typically upgrades activate for the ship as well as the options. (The blue and green upgrades affect the ship as well.)

This game is also more likely to induce epileptic fits than other shmups - the screen flashes red upon destroying an enemy, and you'll be destroying a lot of enemies if you play Zero Wing. If they don't destroy you, of course. Three things:

1. There's a reason other shmups have bullets that are aimed at the player, not at where the player is going to be or where the player is being forced to move by way of being stuck in a small tunnel and being pushed forward by the auto-scrolling.
2. There's a reason other shmups don't have bullets that move faster than the player can dodge them.
3. There's a reason other shmups don't have enemies shooting at you immediately after you respawn.

Due to some uninformed programming choices, Zero Wing is one of the biggest cases of completely unfair difficulty I've seen in some time. Having to constantly restart from a checkpoint with no power-ups and enemies blasting you immediately is just not fun, and that's why I can't recommend this game to anyone but the most morbidly curious wanting to see what exactly "ALL YOUR BASE" came from.

[WarpRattler]

Kingdom Hearts II
Square Enix
PlayStation 2
One player only

Why am I writing about an action RPG in my shmup column? Because it contains a fully-functional and well-made shmup, of course! Gummi ships, a feature of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, are the main characters' only means of travel between worlds. In Kingdom Hearts, gummi ship flights felt like a chore. In Kingdom Hearts II, the gummi ship system was redesigned and expanded into something that was interesting and fun - and extensive enough that it could've been its own game.

Before a mission, the player can customize the ship. Many options are present here. A player can build a ship from scratch (using parts found by flying missions, in treasure chests throughout the game, and acquired in other ways), which limits the ship to a certain complexity and number of parts (which goes up as the player progresses through the game), or use a blueprint (player-made or premade; many premade blueprints include parts the player does not have and cannot be edited). Basic ship parts increase the ship's hit points (as with the main game, it uses a health bar system) and its hitbox. The game contains several weapons systems, including projectile weapons (standard shots, wide shots, and lasers) named after the standard Final Fantasy magic types, and Radiant Silvergun-style swords named after...swords. Other ship parts grant abilities (such as Scan, which does the same as in the main game; there are also abilities not granted by parts that can be turned on or off just like abilities in the main game), increase defense (shields and similar), give the ship a barrier (also shields), or grant extra speed and maneuverability (wheel parts and such). Later on, the player can also design "Teeny Ships," which act like options (not Gradius-style options, which would properly be called "multiples," but Battle Garegga-style options).

Flying a mission is reminiscent of StarFox and other third-person behind-the-ship view 3D shooters. The player blasts away flying Heartless while collecting bonus ship parts and medals to increase score. (Yes, there's an actual score system!) There are three types of missions: medal missions (go for medal level thirty!), enemy missions (kill anything that moves!), and score missions (get points!), each with its own ranking system and rewards. The medal system is somewhat different from that of traditional shoot-'em-ups; your medal rank starts dropping if you don't continue to collect medals (at lower levels, you must collect them by flying into them; with the Treasure Magnet ability at higher levels, they will automatically be collected). At medal level 30, the ship goes into "Berserk" mode, becoming greatly powerful and gaining full item collection ability while it lasts. Berserk mode, incidentally, cannot usually activate until shortly before the end of the mission, though there is a gummi part that can be equipped to put the ship into permanent Berserk mode at the cost of having a maximum of one life.

While I can't recommend Kingdom Hearts II for the convoluted story or much of the main game (riddled with quick-time events and lending too much of a hand to poor players even on the maximum difficulty - problems thankfully remedied in the DS prequel), I can definitely recommend it for an excellent shoot-'em-up that Square Enix would have done well to expand into its own game. If it didn't have the Kingdom Hearts name attached, it'd likely be ranked up there with Einhänder as one of the company's great forays into an unfamiliar genre.

[Glorb]

Nothing good you said about the Gummi ship parts counts because they are CRAP. The only good parts are designing ships like The Penetrator.

[WarpRattler]

Please state clearly in words why you think the only worthwhile part of a well-designed and heavily-customizable space combat system is building flying penes.

[Glorb]

Well, okay, the flying parts themselves are actually pretty good, and certainly better than the rest of the whole game. Building the ships is massively massively fun, though. I seriously can't begin to describe how disproportionate my ship-building time was to actually playing KH2. And what's truly awesome is how said flying penes can, with careful planning, be truly devastating in combat.

[WarpRattler]

I can definitely agree with that - flying missions is great, but the shipbuilding is more immersive than anything else in the game, and if gummi ships were to be a separate game the shipbuilding would need to be emphasized.

[Lizard Dude]

Flying penes can, with careful planning, be truly devastating in combat.

[WarpRattler]

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]

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!

[WarpRattler]

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]

When did this become Warp's Daily Shump?

[WarpRattler]

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.

[WarpRattler]

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]

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!

[Glorb]

Actually, that looks mad fun. I'll check that out.

[WarpRattler]

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.

[WarpRattler]

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]

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]

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!

[WarpRattler]

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]

http://www.youtube.com/user/xoxak#p/u

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

[WarpRattler]

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."

[WarpRattler]

Welcome to DOS Week! I'll be writing about a different DOS-based shoot-'em-up every day this week.

Outer Ridge
GraphicWares
DOS-based PC (DOSBox-compatible)
One player only
Home of the Underdogs page

Outer Ridge is a rather neat 3D Asteroids clone. Destroy a certain number of space rocks, find the exit item, destroy more space rocks, progress further and further, eventually die. A handful of shield and weapon power-ups to collect (plus your basic unlimited-ammo weapon, the Schnotter, named for its booger-shaped bullets). Three difficulty settings, for those of you who like your space-rock-exploding a bit more dangerous. Supports mouse control (fire with the left button and thrust with the right). Overall a fun game, if rather simple.

(Unlike some DOS games, Outer Ridge will not run properly on a present-day machine outside of using DOSBox. The same applies for some of the other games I'll be writing about this week.)

[WarpRattler]

Galactix
Cygnus Software Mountain King Studios
DOS-based PC (DOSBox-compatible, will run under Windows)
One player only
Download at DOS Games Archive

Galactix is a generic wave-based vertical shooter. The Xidus Empire is attacking Earth, and it's up to you to stop them. Armed with a variety of weapons and a claw made for grabbing items dropped by enemies, fight your way through one hundred stages.

Your ship has a basic twin cannon that doesn't do a lot of damage. It also has limited missiles (which are usually a one-hit kill on normal enemies) and further-limited bombs (which, until the last ten waves or so, will destroy all remaining enemies in the wave). It also has a claw for picking up power-ups. These include missiles, bombs, refills for the ship's energy bar (which also refills slowly on its own), and special cannon add-ons (dropped only by minibosses, and lost after a certain amount of damage is taken).

Every five stages, the layout repeats (weak enemies that fire a single slow shot straight down, slightly stronger enemies that fire one or two faster shots, much stronger enemies that fire fast homing shots, a mix of the three enemy types, and a mix of the three enemy types plus a miniboss). At stages 49 and 100, the player fights a boss; at stage 50, the player's ship is outfitted with a special version of the first-level cannon add-on that is restored at the beginning of a stage if it is lost.

Galactix is somewhat fun for the first fifteen stages or so. It's a shame it had to continue for another eighty-five after that. Overall, I find it really hard to recommend this game, especially with Cygnus Mountain King's next game, which I'll talk about later this week.

(If you do decide to give it a try, be sure to use the mouse and keyboard together, as either one alone is a pain.)

[WarpRattler]

Major Stryker
Apogee Software
DOS-based PC (DOSBox-compatible, will run under Windows [but seriously, use DOSBox])
One player only
Apogee's page, with full download link

Major Stryker is a totally awesome vertical-scrolling shooter from 1993. The Kretons are attacking Earth, and it's up to the famed WWIII pilot Major Harrison Stryker to fly a last-chance mission and destroy the Kreton homeworld. Apogee/3D Realms released the game as freeware back in 2006.

The game features three episodes: a lava planet, an ice planet, and a desert planet (intended to be played in that order). Each episode consists of eight regular stages and four bosses, and concludes with the planet exploding. At the beginning of each episode and after each boss, Fleet Admiral Yoshira (a beautiful blue-haired woman; I'm not sure whether she's actually supposed to have blue hair or if it's just due to some sort of limitation of EGA) briefs Stryker and flirts with him.

Your goals are simple: destroy anything that moves, rescue pilots from cryogenic stasis (which works like collecting medals in other shmups, except that they're just sitting there and scroll with the screen), and don't run out of lives. Your weapons can be powered up to make the first task easier (with the ship firing in six directions at once at its highest level). There are also Zap Bombs, which inflict two hits of damage on all enemies (and do nothing to things like the destructible barriers in stage two of the first planet), and temporary rapid fire power-ups. To aid in rescuing pilots (and shooting things), you can collect temporary speed boosts, and I suppose the hover item (which stops the scroll and brings out a group of special enemies) can be used to rescue pilots more easily at some points. Finally, weapon power-ups (which are destroyed instead of your ship when you take a hit if they've been leveled up at all), three types of shields, and extra lives (which flow steadily in novice difficulty and are still kind of common at the medium difficulty setting) all keep you in the game longer.

Major Stryker also has some pretty awesome music, but it doesn't play if you run the game under Windows, so use DOSBox. You'll also want to turn the in-game sound off so that you can actually hear the music.

Overall, Major Stryker is a fun game. Certainly far better than freaking Galactix, anyway. Apogee sure did know how to use more than four colors, unlike Cygnus Mountain King.

[WarpRattler]

Xatax
Pixel Painters
DOS-based PC (DOSBox-compatible)
One player only
Abandonia link

Xatax is a horizontal-scrolling shooter from 1994. It has some lame story about Earth being at peace and people having dismantled all weapons but then having to scramble to find something to fight the devourer Xatax. It looks good, but is highly repetitive, with very little variation in the stage and enemy graphics. The variations in difficulty are akin to those found in a first-person shooter rather than a shmup; that is, enemies take more hits to kill on higher difficulties, rather than firing more bullets. In fact, the only enemies that actually fire bullets at you are ground turrets and the episode bosses. As a result of how difficulty increases work, on Normal and Hard mode, you're completely at the whim of the power-up system.

The power-up system in Xatax sucks. There are shot power-ups, diagonally-firing missiles, multiples, time-limited shields, rapid fire, and extra lives - and while they may drop at a set time, the items that drop are random, which really sucks when half the time you need missiles to kill half the ground enemies in a stage and get useless shields instead. The only power-up that isn't random is the screen-wiping smart bomb, which is only dropped by turrets.

I really can't understand why my childhood self, who had access to good DOS shmups like Major Stryker and Raptor, was so in love with Xatax. I certainly wouldn't recommend it now.

[WarpRattler]

Raptor: Call of the Shadows
Cygnus Software Mountain King Studios
DOS-based PC (DOSBox-compatible) (there's also a Windows version that you don't want to play because it has problems)
One player only
Apogee page, with shareware download and a link to purchase the full version (they only sell the DOS version)

Raptor is a vertically-scrolling shooter. It fits into a subset of shmups called "Euroshmups," which typically feature between-stage shopping and a health bar system instead of lives. Euroshmups tend to have a bad reputation for various reasons - many games of the subgenre are of low quality, are far too easy, and/or do not allow for score play due to the money system and rarity or non-presence of collectible power-ups within stages, among other things. Raptor, thankfully, only suffers from that third problem, and far less so than many games in the subgenre.

Raptor has a pretty simple story - you're a mercenary working for Mega-Corps. You don't play most shmups for story, though, so just start up a character and get flying. There are four difficulty settings: Training Mode, Rookie, Veteran, and Elite. In Training Mode, you play the first four stages of each sector, then restart on Rookie difficulty with the same inventory but no money. Difficulty increases mean enemies require more hits and inflict more damage, and on Elite difficulty, your shields don't recharge when you aren't firing, so be careful!

You start off with ten thousand credits and a ship outfitted with a basic machine gun. A visit to the hangar store will show that this is enough to buy either a shield increase or a scanner that shows boss shield levels. The hangar also contains options to save your game and launch to one of three "sectors" in which to fly a mission (only the Bravo Sector is available in the shareware version). Each sector has ten stages.

If you'll want to survive, you'll need some good guns. Myriad weapons can be found in stages or purchased in the hangar. Some weapons are switched using the number keys a la first-person shooters, while others are always equipped. Screen-wiping bombs, extra shields, and the aforementioned scanner are also available. Killing enemies earns you more money to buy more weapons. You can also earn money from picking up certain items, and you can sell weaponry.

Raptor is pretty fun, and far better than Galactix. It's also cheap - only $5 if you buy the DOS version through Apogee/3D Realms. Cygnus Mountain King sells a Windows version of the game on their site, but it costs more and has some problems not present when playing the game through DOSBox. I recommend at least giving the demo a try.

[WarpRattler]

After Sunday's game, Warp's Weekly Shmup will be moving! More details then.

Overkill
Epic Megagames
DOS-based PC (DOSBox-compatible)
One player only
Full game download at Classic DOS Games

Overkill is a vertically-scrolling shooter for DOS. The best thing I can say about it is that it let me remap the keys - the only other game this week that let me do that was Major Stryker. Overkill was made freeware last year.

Imagine Gradius. Take away the signature ship design. Rotate the playing field ninety degrees counterclockwise. Make the ship hitbox larger than the basic ship. Make popcorn enemies take multiple hits to kill. Implement a really crappy shield system and an even worse fuel system. Alter the Gradius power-up system and include the altered version in conjunction with a standard "each item has a distinct effect" system, but make the items look somewhat similar. Make some horrible color choices at points throughout the game. Make sure the player is left with no power-ups whatsoever if they die. After all this, you're left with Overkill.

Overkill contains six stages. Every stage follows a basic pattern, beginning with a Galaga '88-style wave of enemies, followed by a long section with obstacles and enemies everywhere (note: most vertically-scrolling shooting games do not have indestructible barriers for your ship to crash into, favoring twitch-based gameplay over memorization unless a player tries to play for score), then a section with inorganic destructibles, and ending with your ship flying into a refueling station. Some stages may feature more enemy waves like those at the beginning, and the final stage features a boss before the refueling station.

Your ship has shields, which protect from a limited number of hits, and limited fuel, which drains over time. Unfortunately, your ship's hitbox being larger than the ship means that if you move close to a wall, your shields will drain almost instantly and you will die. Also, some enemies fire the instant their previous shot disappears, which means it's possible to die instantly if you move next to one of them - and with a few appearing in the first level, this definitely isn't a good thing. The fuel system just makes the game more unnecessarily difficult than it already is with the oversized hitbox.

There are four types of items to be collected. Fuel cells and shield restores do what you'd expect, and smart bombs destroy all enemies on screen when collected. The fourth is like the power-up icons in Gradius, advancing the light on a meter in your HUD one space. The different ship power-ups that can be obtained are shot advancements (double shots, then diagonal shots that don't work anything like in the demo, then slow lasers, then fast lasers, then a large ripple laser), missiles (first a "contour" missile that acts like the standard Gradius missile but is fired from both sides, then a limited-use "yo-yo" missile that seeks out enemies), gadgets (first the fire-nose, which attaches to the front of your ship and increases your firepower, then two sets of two side options, then a drone that acts like a Gradius multiple, and finally a second drone), then ship upgrades (first turning your scout ship into a fighter, then into a battlecruiser). Like Gradius, all power-ups are lost upon death; however, Overkill lacks the rank system in Gradius, whereby the game's difficulty is increased as your ship becomes more powerful. Overkill remains at a static difficulty regardless of how weak or strong your ship is.

Overkill is a vertical shooter that plays like a memorization-heavy horizontal shooter. Unfortunately, things like the ship's hitbox and overly-powerful enemies make it far harder than it should be. Were the former problem addressed, the latter would be forgivable, but it instead gets worse as the player's ship is upgraded and becomes larger. Give the game a try if you want now that it's freeware, but I would never have recommended paying for it.

[WarpRattler]

Silpheed
Game Arts
PC-8801, FM-7, DOS-based PC (DOSBox-compatible), Sega CD
One player only
Download at Abandonware DOS

Silpheed is a pretty sweet shoot-'em-up. It features polygonal ships and an odd perspective. Also blowing stuff up, finding power-ups, and not getting your shields depleted. It's actually a pretty basic shmup aside from the graphics and perspective. Doesn't make it any less fun, though. Also, it had a Treasure-developed sequel on the PS2 (Silpheed: The Lost Planet) and a spiritual successor on the Xbox 360 (Project Sylpheed). Not much else to say, honestly!

[WarpRattler]

Eden's Aegis
x.x
PC
One player only
x.x Game Room

Eden's Aegis is too freaking hard, and I love it.

Eden's Aegis is x.x's latest game, and is still in development. The current release contains a completed Original mode (with neither of the other difficulty settings available) and two playable characters, Nanathy and Maple. (The other two characters will be Ridmie, from Green Wind, and Eve, from Eden's Edge.)

As with x.x's other games, Eden's Aegis is a vertically-scrolling bullet hell shooter - hell being the operative word here. The insane number of bullets, high number of points required for an extend (seven million, which would be partway through stage three if you play at all like I do), and lack of a wait mode (artificial slowdown to make the insane number of bullets manageable) make this game far more difficult than x.x's previous efforts. However, the brutal difficulty doesn't make the game any less fun.

Along with increasing the difficulty, x.x introduced a brand new scoring system involving turning bullets into points items by turning enemies blue with a secondary shot and destroying them while they're blue. This attack is limited, but its energy bar refills in a few seconds. These points items also increase a combo counter, which will begin to fall naturally after a couple of seconds. The combo is lost entirely if you auto-guard or die. Enemies are worth points equal to the number displayed times ten, so it's in your best interest to keep it high.

I'm really looking forward to the final version of Eden's Aegis. Hopefully I'll have finished Original difficulty with Nanathy or Maple before then!

EDIT: Eden's Aegis 0.90 is out! All three difficulties, still only Nanathy and Maple.

[WarpRattler]

Alright, slight change of plans. Hopefully this should be the last one of these I post here.

Final Boss
Ebbo & eebrozgi
PC
One to two players (co-op)
Demo download

Final Boss (yes, that's how the name's officially written) is intended as "a love letter to the shmup genre," and plays very much like a shmup history book.

First off, it's intended to look like a game from decades past. The title screen should give you a good idea of the color scheme:



Orange and teal. Yeah. The story is also pretty horrible. Basically, your character wants to be THE FINAL BOSS, and to do this, he has to defeat an evil alien fleet known as the Green Orange.

Beyond the ridiculous setting and the color scheme, Final Boss looks like a pretty solid vertical shooter so far. The demo only contains two levels (and a bunch of extras and secrets) and a meager variety of enemies, but it plays pretty well. The ship's basic weapons are a powerful "tap" shot and a weak rapid-fire double-shot. (The points system is based on the number of hits an enemy has taken when it's destroyed, so it's usually in the player's interest to use rapid-fire.)

There are some problems. It's completely impractical to use the tap shot instead of rapid-fire at any time. Having a separate rapid-fire button for the basic shot a la newer Cave shooters might fix that, though it wouldn't help with the part where you can never use the tap shot if you want to play for score. Also, the only warning when enemies fly up behind you is them flying in the background - most games with enemies from behind have warning signs or something along those lines. (Alternatively, you could just pay more attention to what's going on and not stick to the bottom of the screen.)

So, Final Boss is looking interesting so far. It could turn out pretty good in the end, as long as they stick with what they said about focusing on the gameplay rather than overloading the game with cameos that just make it less fun. And it's got co-op, which is almost unheard of for a PC shoot-'em-up. I recommend giving the demo a try.

[bobman37]

What a shocker.

[WarpRattler]

Alright, guys. New site is partially set up, and posts will be at least once a week starting tomorrow. Link then. Right now, though, here's a link to the game I'll be talking about for my first non-transplanted post there.

[WarpRattler]

It's still Monday somewhere!