31.03.06

Spout

Posted in everything, games at 10:38 pm by the2bears

Spout is surprisingly fun (and frustratingly difficult) for such a simple concept. You have a ship armed only with thrusters. Your goal is to make your way up the screen while avoiding the gray pixels blocking your way. Luckily, your exhaust can melt (or erode) the barriers. You get extra time when you pass each checkpoint, indicated by a solid line (that itself must be melted). That’s it, but it makes great use of a classic trade-off: you have to aim your thrusters at the barriers, which in turn accelerates you away from them and down. Hitting a barrier, or the bottom, means death. I downloaded it from GameHippo, the original author’s page is here.

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Heavy Gun Blossom

Posted in everything, games, shmups at 10:13 pm by the2bears

Actually, it might be Heavy Gun Blossem, but both are used. It’s an interesting little work in progress. So far it’s just shoot and avoid the bullets. The colours caught my eye. The author is looking for constructive critique here, on the Shmups forum.

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30.03.06

PARSEC47

Posted in everything, games, shmups at 11:05 pm by the2bears

PARSEC47 is one of Kenta Cho’s earlier games, and until recently one of the ones I played the least. It just didn’t seem to capture my interest like Noiz2sa, nor did it seem to have the polish of his most recent efforts. Don’t fall victim to this thinking yourself and miss out on a lot of fun.

The game is essentially non-stop shooting of random enemies, with generated bosses appearing at given intervals. I imagine, as with some other ABA Games titles, that the enemies are constructed out of parts: pieces of the ships are purposely scaled to different sizes, combined, and given bullet patterns. It works very well, allowing for the difficulty to scale as you progress, and leaving little time for resting.

Gameplay is simple. You control your ship with the arrow keys (or a joystick may be used), fire with ‘Z‘, with ‘X‘ as the “slow” button. The “slow” button is also used at the main menu to toggle between two modes, roll mode and lock mode. While in roll mode, when ‘X‘ is held down a “rolling” shot builds up. Releasing ‘X‘ fires the rolling shot, which does damage relative to how long you held the key down. Holding ‘X‘ down in lock mode causes missiles to lock on to enemies above you.

With two modes offering fairly different gameplay there’s a lot to like about PARSEC47. As with all Kenta Cho games it has all the “fit and finish” of a complete game, great music, lots of shooting and it’s free to download. What are you waiting for?

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Shade: Developer Diary

Posted in everything, games, mobile, projects, shmups at 10:05 pm by the2bears

A short developer’s diary type update on Shade today, so you know the project’s not completely stalled. Just a little bug that I tracked down, one that will seem pretty naive to a lot of people.

I wrote a 3D vector class, using fixed point math. I was excercising it a little bit by having aliens target the player’s ship when they fired, instead of a fixed velocity. Simple enough, vector subtraction of the player’s position and the alien’s, normalize that and then scale it to the speed of the shot. Except that I was getting all kinds of slow moving bullets, as well as fast bullets. I couldn’t figure it out, and left it sitting for awhile.

Turns out I was not explicitly setting the player’s Z value, which defaulted to somewhere “into” the screen. The aliens were at the front of the screen, so the bullet velocity was correct, as most of the velocity was now along the Z axis. What a dumb mistake, but those are the types of bugs I make.

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29.03.06

Perfect Cherry Blossom

Posted in everything, games, shmups at 10:00 pm by the2bears

It’s been kind of slow lately for shmups recently, so it seems like a good time to introduce Perfect Cherry Blossom, the second of Team Shanghai Alice’s PC based shmups. Fact of the matter is, though, this game likely needs no introduction. It’s a little presumptious of me to try and “show case” it, or even review it from a gameplay perspective as I’m just not very good at “curtain shooting” games.

But here’s what I will say: it continues where The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil leaves off, in both story, style and gameplay. And improves, or perhaps progresses each part. The graphics are more “dreamy” in Perfect Cherry Blossom, making great use of the textures and “billboarding” them for nice effect with the 3D background. The power-up system will be familiar, as will the collection of cards for spells and bombs. There’s the usual mid-level bosses and the end-level bosses, the latter consisting of progressively harder bullet patterns as you “zero” each sub-stage of them. And speaking of bullet patterns, beautiful patterns are the hallmark of Zun’s games, and Perfect Cherry Blossom is no exception.

Download a trial of the game from here. Then, relax, turn the sound up on your PC and let yourself drift into “the zone”. Any fan of shmups owes this game some attention.

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