04/10/2009
We have moved
14/09/2009
Demolition Gunner: In Seek And Destroy
My Next review is another freeware shmup called Demolition Gunner: In Seek and Destroy by the doujin circle Dark Hell Company. They later transformed into Astro Port one of the most well known doujin shmup circles. This version of the game is a black label (update) of the normal Demolition Gunner with a remix mode added. As you can see it has a helicopter for the players craft instead of a spaceship or some cutesy character, of which in a doujin game it’s not seen often compared to euro shmups which tend to use the helicopter a lot more. Rather then been fixed forward facing the helicopter rotates slightly when moving left or right which makes a change from the norm plus makes play easier as due to the large amount the screen scrolls left and right, that forces the player to make long left/right sweeping movement to destroy all the enemies that are off the screen.
The graphics are ok for a 2d doujin shooter, although I do which there was a little bit more variety in the enemies you fight as they all look similar. Even the bosses just looked like larger versions of the normal popcorn enemies. I would have like to see the bosses at least look better. But in the bigger scheme of things this is just a minor gripe I have as the main aspect of any shmup is the playability and bullet patterns. While DG is not a bullet hell in the same sense of Cave, there are plenty of bullets thrown towards you rather then a maze of bullets to navigate through. With this DG is fun to play and will always keep you on your toes. From what I’m able to gather the scoring system is simple. Kill as many baddies as possible and don’t die, plus there are stars for you to collect which increase the score multiplier so collecting these is very important. The other main scoring aspect is the usual end of level tally. You only have the scatter gun for you’re primary weapon which you are able to collect power ups to boost its strength. There is also a secondary weapon in the form of a napalm bomb, which only has a small blast radius and weak power, it won’t cancel any bullets so it’s an offensive weapon only. To balance out its weakness you do get a lot to use in the course of the game. The helicopter has a shield which you are able to upgrade 3 levels by collecting items, each upgrade allows for 1 hit.
This system makes DG a hell of a lot easier then other shmups of its ilk, in the same way Blue Wish Resurrection uses the auto-bomb to make the game easier. Due to this 1CC the game is pretty easy infact to beat the game is to 1CC due to the game giving you no continues. Many will want to play the game on hard mode to get a real challenge. There is also an even harder mode for those pro shmuppers. For those of you who want a chance there is also a remix mode. Which changes the bullets patterns more like a Cave game? Instead of a napalm bomb you have the standard beam attack that also slows the ship down to allow you to weave through the bullets. Playing this in normal I found it to be even easier then the normal mode, finishing the game only on my 2nd attempt. So even novices will find themselves playing remix in a harder mode most of the time.
Rating
Even for its short comings Demolition Gunner ISAD is a lot of fun to play and just like the Blue Wish games suit a gamer who is relatively new to shmups before they move onto more complex and challenging titles. Given that this game is freeware it is good quality and not a game to be missed if you like PC shmups. 3.7/5
11/09/2009
A Tribute To Dead Bubble Bobble Designer
I've only just read about this but Fukio MTJ Mitsuji the man who designed some great games for Taito including the two best Taito platformers Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands and the shooters Storming Party, Syvalion and Volfied has died. Hes death on the EDIT; December 08 was I believe caused by heart attack plus kidney failure and he entered a coma before he died
It is a great shame to lose such a giant in classic video gaming the cutesy platformer Bubble Bobble is own of the best co-op games anyone can play and for you guys who haven't played Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands should check them out imeadiatly! And while you are there play the other great Taito cutesy arcade platformer The Newzealand Story (Of which my avatar is a picture of), another great classic game of which with the other 2 titles I think of the 3 games as almost a trilogy. If you have the 2 great compliation games called Taito Legends 1 (2 is great for classic shmups) for the PC among other platforms you can play all three platforms platformers plus the Qix remake by MTJ, Volfied. Just do yourself a favor and experience these great classic titles and when doing so think of the brilliant design that was in these games and spare a thought for Fukio MTJ Mitsuji.
EDIT
Well this is a superb example of not believing what you read on the net as fact as it turns out Fukio Mitsuji died in December 08 not August DOH!. But rather then remove this post I thought it better to just leave it up as a testament to a great man in the world of video games. All I can say is live and learn :-/
08/09/2009
Blue Wish Resurrection Series
BWR scoring system has you collecting items which are the bullets of a bigger sized enemy converted into items when it's destroyed. So it's a good idea to kill off a enemy when lots of bullets fill the screen. Also there are hidden chests of items for you to find. Here's a secret, on stage 3 if you find all 10 chests, you can uncover a hidden 1up just before the boss if you hold down fire in the middle of the screen. Back to the scoring system, there is a counter of all the items you have collected. At the end of every level all the items will be converted into points. The challenge is to not lose any items during the level, as if you use a bomb, auto bomb or lose a life you will be penalized. Also if you have auto bomb turned off in the options you will earn slightly more points at the end of level score tally then if you had auto bomb turned on. Another aspect of the score system is the distance you are when you destroy the enemy, the closer the better. Touching a enemy will not kill you but do remember in BWR they will still fire as normal so you will have to be careful. Some might consider this a cheap way to die but it is a minor thing imo.
04/09/2009
Nomltest FS
This post is gonna be about the 1st shoot 'em up I played on the PC called Nomltest by the doujin freeware game maker keim. The game is a simple fixed shooter (the screen doesn't scroll) which looks very much like a space invaders clone. I can assure you that even though Nomltest looks like Space Invaders it doesn't play like it as lots of enemy waves zip across the screen in various patterns. The game has no stages instead you are bombarded non stop with ever increasing enemies as the rank increases (game difficulty). Before long you will be dodging like a madman though a screen full of bullets.
Nomltest's scoring relies on eating bullets to get a really good score and pulling off maneuvers where you eat lots of bullets from one enemy bullet pattern reels in a high score and feels very satisfying. Also for every wave of enemy ships you destroy you will get +10 to every eaten bullet, missing a wave decreases the counter by the same amount, Single enemies don't matter. The counter stops at 500 point per bullet and loosing a life will decrease the counter by nearly a half. A often used strategy is to not bother with the bullets at the very start of the game due to bullets eating increases the rank. If you manage to get a really high score which is no easy thing you can unlock two different modes of play. O-gui mode give you the bomb weapon which you can use once a gauge is filled by eating bullets. In Kuidare mode you are unable to shoot but has a system similar to Ikaruga where by which 3 buttons you press you will autmatically eat the same colour bullet your ship is once it enters your force field. Doing so will release a spray of bullets back at the enemy. The difficulty of unlocking the modes is too high, so unless you're a very good shmup player you will need to work hard at reaching a score good enough to unlock them. A fact that on the Shmups.com forum. The Nomltest highscore tables for the two unlockable modes are nearly empty when the normal mode has had many people submitting their scores over the years. There was a file available on the site which unlocked them for you but these links are now dead unfortunatly.
Personally I really enjoyed the game, although some people will be turned off with the simplistic graphics and no scrolling background. I thought the neon space invader graphic style was very original and fitting to what the game is. A no-frills but highly playable freeware title. For those of you who can get past its graphics style will soon be hooked to it's addictive gameplay. Once you get to know the enemies patterns the game is quite easy and has a extremely pleasing rhythm to it as you shoot the enemy and eat their bullets. It's so enticing that many of you will find yourselves still playing the game in the early hours of the mourning. Things are easy to start off but as the rank get higher things start to get very manic and Nomltest will be a challenge to any experience shmup player. The game is a old favorite of the Shump.com forum and was even voted as one of their games to play in last years online shmup tournament. So why don't you head over to the Japanese DL site Vector and download it. But do note there are 2 versions WS (windowed) and FS (full screen), FS is the one to pick as WS does no't have all the features the fullscreen version does.
Rating: 4/5 A very good game for what it is, which is a no-frills freeware game, one that for some can match up to more professionally made shmups for the fun to be had.
If you look at the bottom of this post you will notice that there are some tickboxes I've included for the purposes for site visitors who have played the game to rate the game and we can see if the scores match what rating I've given the game. Sadly I'm unable to have ten tickboxes so we will have to go with a rating of 0 to 5, with 3 been the correct rating for an average game of its genre.
A Little Story
What happened to me is nowhere as drastic as the story I've just told but it is what ultimately brought me to creating this blog. The bad luck I had was the fan off my graphics card falling off, erm melting off would be a better word, since the card was quite old and really needed upgrading anyway it was no major loss in the terms of cash (although i still haven't replaced it due to other priorities with my limited funds). But it did mean I could not play any 3D games due to my gfx card overheating but i could play most 2D games as they didn't overtax my gfx card. I still shudder at the thought of been with no gaming system and having to endure the torture that is the television nowadays urrgggh!
Not been able to play my usual games and been the poor penniless pauper I am it was either Piratebay or a emulator. I choose the later as there are so many great retro games that I missed out on. I started surfing the net for great games of yeasteryear and eventually came across the shoot the core website. For those of you who don't know Shoot the Core was THE website for PC shoot 'em ups (from now on ill use the term shmups instead) it also had a database with hundreds of PC shmups, most of them were Japanese doujin (indie) games which are mostly unknown to gamers in the west. You might of noticed that i have been using words in the past tense, as the website has just recently shut down, a great shame to the shmupping community but steps are been taken to atleast save the database in some form or another. Anyway back to the rest of my story, playing game genres I haven't experienced for a long time I was having a blast playing them. Games which are easy to pick up and don't take any big effort to start playing but are great fun. Simple on the surface but scratch a little deeper and in many cases there is allot there to even keep hardcore gamers happy. Me been a PC gamer for so long I had only been playing those PC fps, rpgs or strategy games that are very deep and have a plot to rival a novel.
I even managed to finish some of the games that Ive never really played before, with me been a Sega fanboy as a kid I missed out on everything Nintendo. Games like Super Mario Bros, Mega Man 1 and Zelda 1, even though the graphics sucked they had playability in spades. Although I will admit to using maps and guides to speed up the time it would take me to clock them, that was especially for Zelda 1 which had many hidden areas and a sizable world that needed mapping out, something I'm not prepared to do as an adult. I really hate to spend too much time grinding nowadays and its a shame as there are many old jrps I wanted to play but know I'll get bored and quit half way through, For example Luna Legend 1 for the PS1, I just cant stomach the combat system but I'm promising myself I will eventually complete it by just taking small bites at a time.
So all in all in not really bothered that my card has just about bit the dust as I have all these great games to play (great games I'm not playing due to spending way too much time trying to edit this post with the crap and buggy editing toolset grrr.) I love the fact that Ive discovered a great genre that been shmups and finding all these hidden gems from Japan. Been part of the shmupping community is kinda special compared to other gaming crowds due to the commitment and how far they sometimes have to go to get those rare Jap games. I hope anybody who read this gets the urge to try out a shmup or two. Thats it for now, in my next post I will write apout just what makes shmupping (playing shoot 'em ups) so special, as although shmups may seem simple at first glane there is more to them that meets the eye.
02/09/2009
Hello World
A good plot can turn a mediocre game into fantastic journey like the Homeworld games the fantastic plot overshadowed the fact that the strategy side was poor as all you needed to do was blob the enemy in most cases to win. Speaking of plot another genre I can be big on is the RPG. I used to be massively into jrpgs since the days of the Mega Drive right up till the PS2 with FFX. Nowadays I’m more into PC rpgs Baulder's Gate series, Dungeon Siege 2 and FPS crossovers like the Elder Scrolls games (I haven’t played Mass Effect yet and i’m really looking forward to it.) The main reason apart from many PC rpgs been more immersive is that many jrpgs just grind way too much with slow random battles (although I hear many newer titles are nowhere near as bad as the old days) It is due to this that I nowadays prefer srpgs like Vandal Hearts or FF tactics and action rpgs like Alundra or old style Zelda of which I recently played Zelda 1 for the nes and liked it so much I finished it. Although I used a map from the net to cut down on time I would of spent mapping and trail and error which would of made me sick of the game enough to abandon it.
I like games in most genres but I only like 1 or 2 titles of a certain genre so I don’t class myself as anything of a fan of said genres. Here are some other games that have a special place in my heart. Street Fighter 2, when I was 11 to 12 I used to spend allot of my time hanging out at a couple of arcades and the SF2 cabinet was the stop I usually spent allot of my time at. Even though I played it allot as Ryu, Ken, Guile or Chun Lee I was never a pro at it although I was very good with special moves and making combos with them. Out of all the fighting games SF2 and its iterations are only the fighting game I ever played (although I have had a few games recently of Melty Blood for the PC and also a bit of Tekken 2). I wouldn't say that I don’t like other fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Fatal Fury its just that I never wanted to take the time and 10 pence pieces to learn the move set of a another fighter, I was happy to get my fighting fix just playing SF2. I cant wait until I buy SF4.
Another genre i’m no major fan of is the strategy genre but I am massive fans of the Homeworld series and the Total War series (still haven’t play the later titles) my favourite game of this type been by far the Rome TW and its add on pack. Even if in RTW the AI was a bit simple nothing could be better then out flanking the enemy with heavy horsemen. Other strategy games I used to love to play when I was a kid but not so much now as I prefer to spend my time playing other games I enjoy more. I especially loved Sid miers games when I had an Amiga 1200 game like the original Civilisation and Colonisation (the theme tune bonny at morn is one of my favourite music from compute games of all time) I also loved his other titles Railroad Tycoon and Sim City Original for the Spectrum +2 and a bit of the later Sim City's for the PC. Before I had my last console pinched i have always enjoyed racing games on each of my games machines just not the PC. I dont know why ive never got into any on the PC as there are some cool multiplayer racing games out there. (something to keep in mind for later I think). Anyway here are some of my favorites, Enduro Racer, Roadblasters, Super Monico GP and ofc the Grand Tourismo Series especially the 2nd game of the series.
Hmmm I think ill call it a night for this my 1st post of my 1st blog ever. I hope you enjoyed what was written here and that you'll also enjoy my further posts I would love some feed back on what you think of my writing style as I don’t know whether to stick to writing in a detailed and long winded style like a newspaper columnist or change to a more formal straight to the point journalistic style. Ill change the comments section to that you can post as an anon and ill keep it like that atleast for a month or two before I change to comments section back to the default log in to comment setup unless you guys want over wise that is.
PS (additional edit) I have learned allot though creating this first post and it's taken a hell of allot longer than I thought I would but hey, It's up now and i've got the ball rolling. I feel very much compelled to add that ive never worked with a program that is such a pain in the ass to laydown pictures and in the size/way you want it. Hopefully as I get further into the tool set i'll pick up some easier tricks.