2417: The Steam Shmup Sale

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There’s a sale running on Steam right now, centred around shoot ’em ups in the classic mould. You can see the full list here, but here are a few selections that I can personally recommend:

ESCHATOS

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The follow-up to Judgement Silversword (which is also worth a go, and available in a bundle with ESCHATOS) is a Raiden-style shoot ’em up (i.e. non-bullet hell) that unfolds over the course of several stages, taking you from an Earth-like planet, into space and finally into the bowels of an alien world. It’s a spectacular, thrilling journey, presented in uncomplicated but nonetheless impressive 3D polygonal visuals but playing from a top-down perspective.

ESCHATOS has a couple of ways to play depending on how complex you like your shmups. For my money, the simpler mode is actually a more enjoyable way to play — this doesn’t involve any powering up of your weapons and simply requires that you defeat complete waves of enemies without missing any to build up your score multiplier. The higher the difficulty you play on, the higher the multiplier can go (and the faster it rises), so for the highest scores you need to take on the toughest challenges the game offers.

ESCHATOS has a fantastic soundtrack, fluid graphics with some wonderful setpieces, and gameplay to die for. If you’re a shmup fan, this should without question be a part of your collection.

Deathsmiles

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Regarded as one of Cave’s more accessible bullet-hell shooters, Deathsmiles is a horizontally scrolling affair for one or two players where you take on the role of one (or two) of several different goth loli chicks, each of whom handle slightly differently. You can shoot in both directions using either a rapid-fire shot, a charged beam or a lock-on laser, and advanced players will need to learn which attack should be used for which enemy, since the scores and collectible items they yield vary according to how they were dispatched. If you’re a shmup beginner, mind, you can ignore this aspect of the game completely and just try to get through the game, because that’s challenging enough in itself.

Deathsmiles has a gorgeous Gothic rock soundtrack a la Castlevania, some varied levels and some brilliant boss fights, culminating in a battle against the spectacularly named “Tyrannosatan” accompanied by Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue. There’s a lot of hidden depth to the scoring system once you get your head around the bullet patterns, and variable difficulty settings that you can change on the fly between levels help give it some longevity. It’s one of Cave’s finest games, and well worth a look.

Savant Ascent

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Based around the music of electronica artist Savant, Savant Ascent casts you in the role of a masked alchemist who has to make his way up a tower to defeat the weird… thing that has manifested at the top. It’s a twin-stick shooter with a twist — in each of the game’s battlefields, the character can only stand in preset places, with pushing directions on the stick moving him from one to the other either by rolling or jumping between them.

The “Story” mode in the game lasts about five minutes and is easily beaten, but the meat of the game comes in the modes that unlock afterwards. Time Attack throws you into a horde of enemies and challenges you to 1) survive and 2) complete the game as quickly as possible. Endless, meanwhile, simply tasks you with surviving for as long as possible.

Longevity in the game comes through score attack and collectible CDs of Savant tracks, each of which unlocks a new gameplay element. What initially appears to be a very simple twin-stick shooter gradually unlocks new depths as you collect more of the CDs and progress further. It’s a beautifully presented game, too, with lovely graphics and a thumping soundtrack courtesy of Savant, obviously.

Horizon Shift

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An interesting twist on the genre, Horizon Shift is presented in a minimalist Geometry Wars fashion, with simple controls and visuals, a thumping soundtrack and immensely challenging gameplay.

Your job in Horizon Shift is to protect your “horizon”, a line dividing the screen into two halves. Your ship can face either up or down, and you can use this ability to dodge bullets, since only bullets on the same side as your ship can destroy you. Your ship can also jump and double-jump, providing another means for avoiding projectiles on the occasions when the “horizon” disappears and requires you to face in one direction only.

Enemies in Horizon Shift are a combination of kamikaze types that destroy part of your horizon when they hit it — meaning you’ll have to jump the gaps or die — and enemies that spew bullets at you. Blasting any type of enemy builds up a chain bonus, and unleashing a smart bomb (which must also be charged by killing enemies) allows you to “bank” this chain bonus; conversely, dying loses the chain bonus altogether.

Horizon Shift has a cool aesthetic, with simplistic visuals in the foreground and a busy but low-brightness backgrounds that evolves as you play through the game. Particularly cool (and cheesy) is the giant laughing “skull” face that dominates the background any time you’re fighting a boss.

Shmups Skill Test

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Blend WarioWare with a shoot ’em up and you have Shmups Skill Test, a short, quick-fire game that challenges you to complete several minigames in succession, then humiliates you about your lack of skill afterwards.

Minigames vary from the delightfully named “TANK TANK TANK TANK TANK” — in which there are lots of tanks to shoot — to one where you have to precisely shoot timebombs off the side of a rocket without blowing the rocket up, and all of them are very challenging indeed, with the possible exception of the one where you have to shoot tin cans (in space) into a giant waste-paper basket (in space) to “save the earth”.

After you’re finished, you’re given a breakdown of your skills, a comparison to the online average rating and your “gamer age” is calculated a la Brain Age on the Nintendo DS — the lower the better.

This game is hard, but it has a lot of staying power thanks to a variety of minigames, online leaderboards and support for up to four-player competitive play. Plus, as its name suggests, it’s actually good training for the various skills modern shmups demand of you.

2196: Starward Rogue, a Game About a Severed Head in a Mech

I took a look at Arcen Games’ latest today. I’ve followed this interesting developer for a few games now, most notably A Valley Without Wind and its sequel: two games that fused, oddly enough, turn-based strategy with Metroidvania-esque platform shooting. Arcen’s latest game Starward Rogue continues the dev’s tradition of fusing disparate genres together, in this case arcade shooters and roguelikes.

I say “disparate”; Starward Rogue isn’t the first game to combine roguelike elements with a shoot ’em up core, but it is the first I recall seeing designed around the principles of Japanese-style arcade shooters, particularly those of the “bullet hell” variety. That means intense, complex bullet patterns that you need to navigate through as well as enemies to defeat, and it makes for an exciting, very interesting take on a genre that all too often coasts along without any real innovation.

Starward Rogue casts you in the role of a severed head in a mech as you attempt to rescue someone called Rodney from the depths of a dungeon called the Megalith. I believe these two elements are a reference to one of Arcen’s other games, but it’s one I’m not familiar with at this time. Fortunately, no real knowledge of whatever the other game it’s referring to is required; it’s simply a bit of fanservice for those who have played the game’s spiritual predecessor. Rodney is an entertaining character in his own right, though my only direct contact with him so far has been in the tutorial sequence.

Starward Rogue‘s gameplay is balanced nicely between exploration and action. Each level of the Megalith is split into discrete rooms, each of which has to be cleared of enemies before you can move on to the next one. Unlike similar games such as The Binding of Isaac, though, Starward Rogue’s rooms are often more than a screen wide and tall, and there are a number of unique designs and layouts that you’ll encounter over the course of the game, which are then combined with various enemy and trap waves — the latter tending to be non-destroyable obstacles or gun turrets that will spew out hot fiery death as you try and take down the enemies, then deactivate when you’ve cleared the room.

Levelling up is a simple process: no stat allocation here, simply pick one of three randomly selected perks. These vary from increased damage to having a full map available from the start of the floor — and even being able to skip the rest of the floor you’re on. Alongside these passive bonuses you get from levelling, you can also equip and upgrade your infinite-ammo main gun, your recharging Energy-based weapon (which recharges when you enter a new room) and your limited-ammo Missile weapon. There are also various other passive upgrades you can collect, and one-shot consumable items that generally have some sort of “smart bomb” effect.

Much like the aforementioned The Binding of Isaac, Starward Rogue is a game intended to be replayed and rechallenged. There are a number of different mechs with which to play the game, and there’s a checklist of enemies and items you’ve found over the course of all your runs. There are also five difficulty levels to choose from, with Very Easy all but guaranteeing a full clear run unless you are the very worst kind of incompetent moron, and the highest difficulty claiming to offer difficulty on a par with the legendary Touhou series. And on top of that there are a bunch of achievements to earn, too, so it’s very much a game that will keep you busy for a long time if you get it — though it’s accessible enough to be able to pick up every so often for a quick blast even if you’ve left it alone for a while.

I completed a Very Easy run earlier — there’s no shame in starting either a roguelike or a shoot ’em up on the lowest difficulty, and this game is both! — and am already looking forward to giving it another shot soon. If you’re a fan of The Binding of Isaac and its ilk — “roguelites”, to use the popular term — then you could do far worse than give Starward Rogue a look.

2115: Jade Penetrate

Had a go at a game that’s been loitering in my Steam library for a while today: eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package. This curiously named game is the third in a series of Japanese indie “bullet hell” shoot ’em ups that I grabbed in some Steam sale or other and have never really explored all that much. The first two games are rather Touhou-ish, while the third, developed by a different team and having a plot that seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with the first two, draws favourable comparisons to Cave’s Mushihimesama series — that, coincidentally, is coming to Steam tomorrow.

Anyway. This being a Japanese game there is a plot where you perhaps wouldn’t normally expect to find one, involving some sort of “to the death” tournament between what appear to be dragon girls aiming to rule over Pandemonium. As you might expect, angst and melodrama ensues and while none of it really matters to the actual game as such, the character designs are cute, the voice acting is decent and it infuses the game with a certain degree of personality that it might not otherwise have had.

The thing I like about eXceed 3rd is that it’s not the kind of bullet hell game that immediately slams your face into a desk and then flushes your head down the toilet. It’s accessible and easy to understand, though to get the highest scores you’ll need to be a little more technical. There’s just two modes of fire — a standard spread shot and a focused attack, which also doubles as a “precise movement” mode — along with the usual bombs, plus a super-powerful special attack. This charges up over time, but can also be charged by grazing bullets, collecting items and various other means.

Boss fights are split into clear and obvious phases, each with memorable names that assist with the learning process that is so important to this kind of game. In many ways, the boss battles are very much the focal point of the game, with the popcorn enemies during the main part of the level being more “filler” than anything else — though there are still some interesting bullet patterns to navigate through before you can challenge the stage’s boss.

As is so often the case with Japanese indie games, eXceed 3rd runs at an incredibly low resolution — 640×480 — which means it will display on pretty much any screen and run at 60fps without too much difficulty. And as is so often the case with Japanese indie games, because eXceed 3rd has been specifically designed for this low resolution, it still manages to look good despite being technically inferior to pretty much everything else in the modern PC gaming market. The attractive, fluid visuals combine with an absolutely rockin’ soundtrack to produce a shmup that really gets the pulse racing — exactly as it should be.

I don’t feel I’ve played the game enough to comment in any more detail on it just yet, but I enjoyed the little I played earlier, and am looking forward to investigating it further. Pewpewpew!

2069: Cardinal Sins

In between some lengthy Grisaia sessions today — I’m tackling Michiru’s route now, and my goodness is there going to be a lot to talk about there — I decided to check out some shoot ’em ups that hit Steam the other day: Eschatos and Judgement Silversword, previously available on Xbox 360 and, in the case of Judgement Silversword, the WonderSwan Color, of all things.

Judgement Silversword comes with a spinoff game called Cardinal Sins, and it’s actually that I’ve spent the most time playing today. Cardinal Sins takes the basic gameplay of Judgement Silversword and, instead of pushing you through a sequence of stages with difficulty that gradually ramps up (with a few big spikes along the way, if the first boss is anything to go by!) it challenges you to complete various objectives in the stage.

The game is themed around the Seven Deadly Sins, with each of the seven stages being named after one of them and providing you with a different means of attaining a strong grade or “judgement” at the end of the game. The first stage Envy, for example, tasks you with simply destroying as many enemies as possible, with your grade dependent on the percentage of all the available enemies you destroyed. Sloth, meanwhile, tasks you with simply grabbing as many extra life pickups as you can (and you can destroy them, so you have to actually ease off the shooting a bit), while Greed tasks you with “gathering data” on enemies by fulfilling various hidden conditions.

Greed is perhaps the most interesting of the stages as well as the most thematically appropriate, because getting too greedy for the “data” will result in your untimely destruction; instead, you need to learn moderation (or at least master the peculiar “shield” ability your ship has, which allows you to cancel bullets, but only from the front of your ship) in order to succeed.

After Greed comes Pride, where your job is to raise your score multiplier to x100 by destroying enemies as efficiently as possible — your multiplier increases by one for every enemy destroyed, but also drops by one every second or so. Following this is Lust, where you must clear as many enemy waves as possible; Gluttony, where you must destroy enemies for collectibles; and finally Wrath, where you are graded according to how many times your ship is destroyed during a horrid boss fight.

Interestingly, Cardinal Sins doesn’t kick you out to a Game Over screen if you run out of lives at any point; you always play through the seven levels in order, with your lives being reset at the start of each stage. Run out of lives and you simply get a “failing” F-grade on that stage, but you can carry on. There’s incentive not to do this, however; get through all the stages without any failures and you’ll be presented with the final battle, initially against a series of small but strong bullet-spewing enemies, and subsequently against a larger version with some seriously unpleasant bullet patterns to fend off. Only by defeating this “Mirror of Cardinal Sins” can you clear the game and sit back with a satisfied expression on your face.

I really like this game for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s nice to play a game that is genuinely retro rather than the fashionable faux-retro of much of the indie scene today; the game features some simple but deliciously crunchy chiptune music and sound effects as well as some limited but effective and clear visuals.

Secondly, it’s damn fun. The difference in structure from the usual shoot ’em up format of “survive as long as you can” makes it immediately stand out for me, and I’m a sucker for anything with an interesting grading and scoring system.

Thirdly, I’d never heard of it before, and now it’s on Steam a whole bunch of newcomers — including me — will get to experience it for the first time, along with its companion game Judgement Silversword and its pseudo-sequel Eschatos.

With Cave shoot ’em ups apparently on the way to PC via Steam soon, it’s starting to look increasingly likely I can finally retire the Xbox 360, which had previously been my shmup machine due to Japan’s bizarre rejection of the platform for everything except fantastic arcade shooters.

2057: Assault Android Cactus is Out Later This Month, and Here’s Why You Should Buy It

First things first: please forgive the Kotaku-style headline, but I started capitalising headlines in this way when I first started posting on this blog and now I can’t bring myself to change to AP style without going back and changing all my previous ones. And, since there are well over 2,000 “previous ones”, that would take a very long time indeed. So awkwardly capitalised headlines it is for now.

But I digress, and I haven’t even started yet, so let’s begin again.

Nearly two years ago, my then-managing editor Jaz Rignall pointed me in the direction of an intriguing-looking Early Access game on Steam called Assault Android Cactus. After taking a peek at the pre-alpha build, I began corresponding with Mr Sanatana Mishra from developer Witch Beam Games, and it transpired that the game would be on show at the then-new Eurogamer Expo (now known as EGX). Since I was heading to EGX anyway, I made an appointment to meet with Mishra and have a chat about the game, and in the meantime I familiarised myself a little more with the early build.

When I first heard about Assault Android Cactus, I wasn’t sure what to think. On paper, it sounds like any number of games that bloat Steam’s marketplace daily — it’s an arcade-style twin-stick shooter inspired by retro classics — but it quickly became apparent from playing through the limited number of levels in the early build that there was actually something quite special taking shape here. This feeling was further compounded when I eventually made it to the Eurogamer Expo and had a thoroughly enjoyable chat with Mishra about the game and the team’s plans for it in the long-term — to cut a long story (which you can read in full here) short, it was apparent that Witch Beam was a small team who were absolutely dedicated to making Cactus the best experience it could possibly be, and to creating a truly authentic Dreamcast-style experience heavily inspired by the masters of Japanese shoot ’em ups like Treasure, Cave and their ilk.

Since I first gave Cactus its glowing write-up on USgamer, I’ve checked in on the Early Access build numerous times as it’s developed, and regularly talked about how much I like it. I’ve also kept in touch with Mishra and the rest of the team at Witch Beam via Twitter, and it’s been a genuine pleasure to witness the passion they’ve been pouring into their project. It’s been a long and slow road to release for the game, but recently the team finally announced that the full, non-Early Access version would be hitting Steam on September 23, 2015, and that the promised console versions would be following early next year.

I received an email from Mishra last night containing a beta code for the review build of Assault Android Cactus’ full version as a “thank you” for the support I’ve shown them over the last couple of years. Touched by this thoroughly nice gesture of appreciation, I made a point of downloading the new build this morning and playing it for a good few hours. And it seems my early impressions were very much correct: Assault Android Cactus is something very special indeed, and if it doesn’t end up taking its rightful place of honour alongside modern arcade classics like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi, Geometry Wars and their ilk, something is very, very wrong.

For the unfamiliar, Assault Android Cactus is, as previously mentioned, a twin-stick shooter. There’s a few twists on the usual formula, though: the right stick just aims rather than shoots, for one, so you have to actually pull the trigger to fire, while the left trigger swaps between your chosen character’s main and secondary weapon. Main weapons have unlimited ammunition; secondary weapons have a cooldown before they can be used again, but tend to be considerably more powerful.

Another major twist on the formula is the fact that there’s no lives system, with the challenge factor instead coming from a time limit represented by the characters’ declining battery charge. Blowing up a wave of enemies allows you to collect a recharge item, while getting knocked down wastes time and battery charge as well as costing you some points, so avoiding getting hit is a very important part of going for high scores. The battery system proved to be a controversial addition to the game when it was first put in place, but it’s now such an integral part of the game structure that it’s difficult to imagine Assault Android Cactus without it. It ensures the game strikes a good balance between accessibility for casual players and rewarding skilful play from the people who know what “1CC” stands for.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of Cactus’ gameplay is its selectable characters, who are gradually unlocked as you progress through the main series of levels. Far from just being different skins, each of the playable android characters handles uniquely, with very different main and secondary weapons allowing you to play in different ways. Title character Cactus is the most straightforward, boasting a simple machine gun and short-range flamethrower combination, while Aubergine is one of the more peculiar offerings due to her main weapon being an independently controlled helicopter drone and her secondary weapon being the ability to summon a quantum singularity and suck everything into it. The way the different characters play is one area where Witch Beam has clearly taken inspiration from classic Japanese shoot ’em ups, since many of these have selectable ships with different weapon setups. There’s a huge amount of creativity in the way the characters play, though, and it’s a real pleasure to get a handle on how some of the more outlandish characters work. (I still have no idea how to use Aubergine effectively, mind.)

Another interesting aspect is in the level design. Cactus could have easily been a straightforward arena shooter, but instead the levels show a great deal of variety in their structure. While they all have the same goal — destroy all the enemies — some of them take place in a confined space; some of them unfold in an arena that changes shape over time; some of them are in levels that force you to move from one place to another. One particularly memorable one scrolls infinitely in every direction, with checkerboard floor tiles flipping up and down according to which direction you’re going; the backdrops are always interesting and exciting to look at as much as the main action is.

Cactus’ long-term appeal comes from the same place as other arcade-style shooters: score attack. Completing a level immediately shows you a leaderboard as well as a letter grade, with the elusive “S+” rank being reserved for those who chained all of the enemies in a level into a single combo, didn’t die and were generally a bit of a superstar. After attaining an S+ rank, you unlock “Pro Mode”, which puts an on-screen indicator on your HUD showing whether or not it’s still possible to attain an S+ on the level you’re playing; you can also quickly restart a level if you make a mistake along the way somewhere.

The ranking system has been well thought out. Levels are designed so that you can “learn” them, much like a bullet hell shooter, and attaining the best ranks is dependent on you figuring out these enemy patterns, how to avoid their attacks and how to ensure that you’re always on the offensive to keep your combo active. Bosses are similar, unfolding across several learnable phases, with the boss’ health bar clearly showing where there’s a phase transition so you can ensure you’re in an advantageous position ahead of time.

If you’re not in the mood for score attack, though, some Sega-inspired “EX options” allow you to play the game in various different ways. You can try the game in first-person, for example, or from a fixed isometric perspective rather than the dynamic camera angles of the regular game — though both of these options disable the leaderboards. There are also several graphical filter options — including an entertaining “JJ Mode”, which spooges lens flare and bloom all over the screen for an incredibly colourful experience — as well as options for having AI players alongside you or taking on co-op enemy waves with just a single player.

In short, if you’re a fan of arcade-style shooters and you’re looking for something entertaining to feed your virtual quarters into, Assault Android Cactus is pretty much an essential purchase. Combine the solid main campaign with other enjoyable modes such as the never-ending Infinity Drive mode and the randomly generated Daily Drive confrontation, and you have a game that will keep you occupied for a very long time indeed — and one that I will quite happily purchase again on PS4 when that version hits early next year.

1920: Old-School Shooting

In the same bundle I grabbed primarily for Crimzon Clover World Ignition the other day, I also received a copy of Raiden III. I haven’t played a Raiden game since the original PS1 era, when the bundle of Raiden and Raiden II that came on a single disc (Raiden Project, I think it was called?) was one of my favourite games, despite it not exactly showing off the then-new hardware to its maximum potential.

Raiden III has been an interesting blast from the past, no pun intended. Although I very much enjoy danmaku (bullet hell) shooters, Raiden III is a pleasant reminder that you don’t need to completely fill the screen with bullets to be challenging, and nor do you need an overly convoluted scoring system to be interesting. Raiden III is simple and straightforward, but actually has a surprising amount of depth and strategy to it, particularly with regard to the various weapon pickups available to you.

I was pleased to see that the bendy laser I always used to find so hilarious in the earlier Raiden games is back, though this time around it’s green rather than purple. I was also pleased to see that the red weapon is still capable of filling the screen with as many bullets as a danmaku shooter’s default player sprite configuration. And I was delighted that the game is accompanied by an appropriately cheesy yet pulse-pounding soundtrack that complements the on-screen action perfectly.

What I was most surprised about, however, is how good it actually looks despite running at 640×480 resolution (and vertically letterboxed, to boot, thanks to most shoot ’em ups’ vertical screen orientation) and having precisely no graphical options to speak of whatsoever.

Raiden III, for the unfamiliar, eschews the sprite-based ships and 2D backgrounds of its predecessors in favour of full-on polygonal 3D. The backgrounds are 3D, too, which gives them the flexibility to pitch, roll, swoop and change altitude in a far more dynamic manner than the old-school 2D backdrops, making the game quite a thrill ride. (Recent shmups from Edelweiss such as the fantastic Astebreed and Ether Vapor Remaster have continued this proud tradition in glorious 1080p.)

The most surprising thing about the visuals is how much it still looks like a Raiden game. The distinctive appearance of the player ship, its weapons and even the enemies is kept completely intact despite the move to polygonal 3D, and I think this is a large contributing factor to the game still managing to genuinely look good on a 55-inch widescreen TV at vertically letterboxed 640×480. It runs as smooth as butter, too — although I’d hope so on my rig — and has proven to be a lot more addictive than I originally anticipated when I first booted it up the other day to kill a few minutes.

Raiden III, then, provided me with proof positive that resolution really doesn’t matter to me, even as the new generation of consoles has players becoming increasingly sniffy about games that don’t run in “true 1080p”. If your overall design is up to snuff, you could be running at 320×200 and still look great, and Raiden III, like many other ageing games, is very much testament to that.

1916: How an MMO Taught Me to Be a Better Shmup Player, and Other Stories

Today I’ve been playing a few different games, including Grand Theft Auto Online, One Way Heroics and Crimzon Clover: World Ignition.

Before I go any further, I just want to share a video I knocked up in five minutes using GTA’s built-in video editor. I’m looking forward to having a play with this; I haven’t seen an in-game editor so flexible since Driver on the PS1, and my friend Woody and I used to spend hours making ridiculous car chase movies with that.

But GTA is not what I want to talk about today. Rather, I want to talk a little about the last game I mentioned: Crimzon Clover: World Ignition. As you can probably surmise from the overblown title, this is a Japanese game; those of you with particularly strong game genre intuition will also have doubtless correctly identified that it is a shoot ’em up, specifically of the danmaku (bullet hell) variety.

I grabbed Crimzon Clover this week as part of GOG.com’s recent “tower of sales”. They were selling a pack of shoot ’em ups, several of which I’d had my eye on for a while, and one of which (the rather marvellous Astebreed, which was one of the last things I reviewed over at USgamer) I already owned, but it turned out that removing that from the package actually made it more expensive, so now I have two copies. Anyway, I digress; the sale has now ended, but Crimzon Clover is still pretty cheap anyway, so if you’re looking for some fun arcade-style blasting action, you could do far worse than grab a copy — and remember, there’s no shame in playing on “Novice” difficulty, so long as you don’t use the “Continue” function!

For those who haven’t been following me for a while, are unfamiliar with the modern conventions of the shoot ’em up genre or with Japanese gaming in general, a danmaku shooter is characterised by its extremely hectic patterns of bullets filling the screen which, at first glance, look impossible to avoid. That is, until you realise that the ship you’re flying has a “hitbox” much smaller than its complete sprite, which means you can get away with “grazing” bullets so long as they don’t hit the (usually explicitly visible) hitbox. In fact, some danmaku shooters ever reward you for grazing bullets without being destroyed.

The other defining feature of a danmaku shooter is a somewhat convoluted scoring system. Crimzon Clover is a little more straightforward than some of the more obtuse systems that renowned genre specialist Cave has come out with over the years, but it still requires something of an understanding beyond “shoot everything” in order to get the truly high scores.

But again, chasing high scores isn’t what I wanted to talk about today; instead, I want to talk about something I noticed while I was playing Crimzon Clover earlier today, and that’s the awareness that I suddenly had of myself using disciplines I’d picked up from a completely different game: Final Fantasy XIV.

Crimzon Clover and Final Fantasy XIV would doubtless not appear to have anything in common at first glance, but bear with me. Boil both of them down to their purest essence and they are both games about learning attack patterns and responding to them. Neither of them depend on randomness for the most part, with every encounter instead being meticulously scripted and choreographed down to the last detail; both of them reward taking the time to familiarise yourself with these patterns and know how to deal with them. In other words, knowing your part of the overall intricate dance of death and destruction on the screen.

This becomes even more obvious when fighting a boss in Crimzon Clover and, indeed, most other danmaku shoot ’em ups. One thing that both Final Fantasy XIV and Crimzon Clover have in common is a phase-based structure for boss fights: the boss uses a certain set of attacks until you damage it a certain amount (or, in some cases, a certain amount of time passes), then it moves on to something else, then perhaps something else, then perhaps something else after that. The most complex fight in Final Fantasy XIV I’ve done to date, for example — The Second Coil of Bahamut, Turn 4 (aka Turn 9, aka Nael deus Darnus) is split across four different phases, each of which is completely different from the last, and each of which requires learning independently of the others.

Crimzon Clover, meanwhile, is no exception to this rule, with bosses having set bullet patterns and special attacks according to which phase you’re on at any time; the one difference is that phase transitions are explicitly marked on the boss’ health bar in Crimzon Clover (and, again, in most other danmaku shmups) while in Final Fantasy XIV it’s a case of learning when the changeovers happen and how to time them so that you and your party are in a good position to deal with them when they happen. (The fact that Crimzon Clover is designed for one or two completely independent players while Final Fantasy XIV is designed for four to eight interdependent players is another difference, of course, but this added complexity is mitigated a little by the fact you’re not dodging literally thousands of bullets at any given moment. At least not in any encounter I’ve challenged so far.)

The thing I became aware of as I had a go at the first few levels of Crimzon Clover today — I haven’t managed to clear the game yet, as it’s pretty tough, even on Novice difficulty! — was that I was using most of the same skills I used while playing Final Fantasy. I was learning to observe patterns and anticipate what came next; I was moving into advantageous positions before all hell broke loose; I was learning from my mistakes rather than becoming frustrated by them.

These are all skills that, if we pull back and look at a lot of different games, are fairly common. But I’ve become most keenly aware of them while playing Final Fantasy XIV in particular, and it was a little surprising — and pleasing — to be aware of how applicable they were in a “cross-discipline” situation in a completely different game today. (And yes, Dark Souls fans, I know they’re applicable to that game too, but… I just can’t, okay?)

Also, Crimzon Clover is fucking awesome and if you like beautifully slick, gorgeous shoot ’em ups then I recommend you go grab yourself a copy from Steam or GOG.com right now!

#oneaday Day 67: Cultural Differences

Games are a fairly unique medium in that they allow pretty much anyone easy access to material from other cultures without the language barrier necessarily getting in the way. A book in a language you don’t understand, for example, is pretty much useless. A film can be appreciated for its direction and cinematography if not understood. Music can be enjoyed on a certain level. But a foreign game, assuming its not too story-heavy, can be enjoyed by anyone.

It’s here that we run into the East-West divide. Both parts of the world enjoy producing games with stories, though Western stories often tend to err on the side of “gritty” while Japanese tales tend for the most part to be more on the colourful, melodramatic side, often derided by people who don’t enjoy them as being “emo”. Let’s leave narrative-heavy games aside for a moment, though, and look at games that are “gameplay experiences” first and foremost.

For comparison purposes, I’m going to take dear departed Bizarre Creations’ Geometry Wars 2 for the Western front, and CAVE’s Deathsmiles for the Eastern front. Both are Xbox 360 titles, both released at a low price point, though Deathsmiles saw a retail release as opposed to Geometry Wars 2‘s Xbox LIVE Arcade-only release. This, in itself, is somewhat telling.

Let’s consider the games’ respective aesthetics first. Geometry Wars 2 is, as you may expect from the title, abstract in nature. There are no “characters”, there’s no “story”, it’s just a bunch of neon shapes against one little white abstract “ship”, and everything explodes into a shower of beautiful fireworks. It’s spectacular to behold (assuming the person playing is any good) and recognisably “next-gen” (or “current-gen” if you prefer, since it’s technically more accurate).

Deathsmiles, on the other hand, looks like a SNES game, albeit one with enough things on screen to make the little Nintendo box explode. It’s all sprite-based, it has chunky pixel-art backgrounds that have been upscaled to HD but not quite by enough, it has animations done by hand rather than generated procedurally and suffers from occasional slowdown due to the sheer amount of shit happening on screen at once.

Not only that, though, but Deathsmiles has “character”. Rather than the abstract appearance of Geometry Wars 2, the player “ship” in Deathsmiles is a person. Specifically, it’s one of four underage Gothic Lolita angels dressed in borderline-inappropriate costumes accompanied by a familiar. Similarly, all the enemies are recognisable as “monsters”, be they humanoid, dragons, flying eye things with bat wings, spiders or indeed the wonderfully named final boss, Tyrannosatan.

The key thing about the two games’ respective aesthetics, though, is that Geometry Wars 2 is consciously trying to look shiny and new, while Deathsmiles is more than happy to look like an arcade game from at least 10 years ago—the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. Neither approach is necessarily more or less valid than the other, but it’s an interesting contrast.

Then we come to how the two games play. Geometry Wars 2 has a variety of modes, all of which can be explained very easily. They all involve killing things before they touch your ship, with only a couple of modes (King, in which you may only fire while sitting in certain temporary “zones”; and Pacifism, in which you can’t fire at all and can only destroy things by detonating “gates” by passing through them) varying even slightly from this formula.

Deathsmiles, on the other hand, should be a simple matter to explain. It’s a shoot ’em up, after all—how complicated can it be? But I attempted to explain it to a friend earlier and ended up confusing both myself and him. The game’s tutorial makes it sound rather straightforward—fire in either direction, use a smart bomb, charge up shots or use a lock-on attack—but in fact there’s a surprising amount of hidden depth.

Firstly, since it, like Geometry Wars 2, is a game about getting high scores, there’s a somewhat intricate method to attaining the highest scores that involves destroying the correct enemies with the correct type of shots. The game mentions this in passing, but it’s up to the player to determine what it actually means. Geometry Wars 2, on the other hand, is about shooting shit and using a bomb if you’re in an inescapable situation.

Secondly, there’s the key element of the “bullet hell” shooter—the hitbox. Graze any enemy in Geometry Wars 2 and your ship explodes. But the same isn’t true in Deathsmiles—mercifully, since the player sprite is relatively large. No, instead there’s a pulsing “heart” symbol in the middle of your characters chest and that—and only that—is the thing that can be damaged. Because this is so small, it means you can navigate your player character through intricate arrangements of bullets that initially seem impossible to avoid. Much of the game becomes about less about shooting things and more about learning how and when these patterns appear, and finding an appropriate path through them. The patterns are the same each time, too, so you certainly can “learn” the game, as opposed to Geometry Wars 2‘s more random chaos.

Then there’s the matter of replay value. Both games are designed to be replayed in a “score attack” style. But Geometry Wars 2‘s sessions tend to be rather short for the most part—a few minutes at most. In most modes, the game ends when you’re dead. More skilled players get to play for longer in most cases.

Deathsmiles, on the other hand, takes you through at least 6 levels, the order of which you can select to a certain degree, and offers you unlimited continues. The whole game takes about 20-30 minutes from start to finish. This means that “beating” the game is within the reach of absolutely anyone, even on the hardest difficulty settings. Sure, you’ll get crap scores, since your score resets to zero every time you continue, but you can at least reach the end and whore for Achievements if that’s your bag. The sign of a skilled Deathsmiles player, then, is not how long they play for, but how long they can survive without their score resetting. This doesn’t necessarily have to be from the beginning of the game, as tackling the levels in different orders can provide optimum bonus-point scoring potential, but then we get into a whole other order of depth.

It’s interesting to see two wildly different approaches to what is essentially the same genre—the shmup—and contrast them. I like both games very much, but I feel that most people will probably find themselves favouring one or the other, much like game design philosophy in general.

I’ll leave you with one of the most interesting things to ponder: whether Deathsmiles‘ character designs would have ever been green-lit by a Western developer, even knowing the fact that the arguably “sexualised” nature of them doesn’t factor into the game itself at all? I somehow doubt it. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

Cute, right? Bit of a stockings and thighs and boobs theme going on. We’ve seen self-consciously sexy Western female characters before, so surely nothing new there. How about if I tell you how old they’re all supposed to be?

Yeah. Pervert.