wasteblock E17

hardcore shmuppers no doubt know of the tohou series, an unbelievable feat managed by the ever mysterious and little girl loving zun. they are especially known for their absolutely rediculous difficulty. tohou koma is a fan game of the tohou series that gives us an idea of what the touhou games would play like if they were made for the NES. a very well done game, and with a hilarious cart-failure ending. download here.

i played uh....four or so different shmups on ps2 today. after deciding stag12 was not as good as i remembered it to be, and raiden III being not as fun the 400th time, i turned to mushihimesama, which i had really not played much of. after having a moderately enjoyable time playing on normal, i switched to hard because i secretly hate myself. then i discovered arrange mode and had a wonderful time at that, despite sucking as much as i do. i think i made it to the fourth level on arrange mode. quite enjoyable. plus massive multipliers. ive attatched a really terrible screenshot, as its on my television. soon though, i will have a vga box that might allow me to take good screens of dreamcast shooters.

You never realize just how much you miss people in detailed rubber suits fighting other people in rubber suits.
Keita Amemiya is one of my current favorite makers of films including such elements, including Mechanical Violator Hakaider, two Kamen Rider Movies, and the two Zeiram movies. This is only a fraction of everything he has done, and from what I have seen so far, its some of the best sentai ever. Ridiculously elaborate designs, and all the crazy gore you could want. I really cant explain much more with words, so here are some pictures instead.

other than this, ive mostly been watching anime and not so much movies worth talking about. i still should probably do a review for we are the strange, and i feel bad for not posting as much.

i played raystorm about a year and a half ago, before i enjoyed shooters as i do now.
i thoroughly hated it, and proceeded to throw away the disc i had burned it onto, as well as raycrisis, which i assumed to be about the same, but did not play.

about....uhg.....several months ago. i redownloaded raycrisis and found it to be utterly fantastic. i then more recently learned about a simple 1500 compilation disc with both raycrisis and raystorm, and for the sake of saving space, i decided to download it.


hoowow. so. upon replaying raystorm, after having played several siter skain games, most notably altynex i think it was, and playing the original, layer section, i extremely enjoyed raystorm. looking at it from a different perspective, what starts out as a generic shooter with an interesting mechanic ends up being one of my favorite psx shooters, easily breaking into the top ten.

this game polishes the generic space shooter in many ways and greatly uses its layered mechanic especially in one of my favorite levels, the battleship field. any shooter that lets me utterly destroy battleships without a thought gets a good rating from me. the enemy and boss design is fairly interesting and is a deafening breath of fresh air after playing soldner x. the levels vary just right, ranging from cities to oceans to massive space encounters with bosses that look a secretly lot like certain gundams from certain movies regarding certain captains who are adored by a certain little girl not to mention any names chars counterattack cough. that along with awesome miniscule level details, such as a waterfall or a massive background architecture, make this game pretty enjoyable. not quite as pure awesome as raycrisis, but still very well done.

go play it.

well.
i wasnt really expecting much and it really didn't deliver much. after reading the hype for this game for several months prior to its release, i had pretty much a perfect idea of what it was going to be, or rather, what it was going to try to be.
what it ended up as seems to be an overly detailed, systematically flawed game with a very ugly ship. i would not want to save the world in this ship, but thankfully i dont have to.
the enemies are the usual menagerie of monsters and other ships, lacking a considerable amount of originality. which is what this game continues to lack for pretty much the entire game.
the weapons system and chain system really bother me, as the game forces me to switch weapons in time to even count the chain ive built up. that seems to be the only solid way of obtaining powerups though, so i have to rely on it.
the weapons are nothing new, the levels are within the norm, the enemies leave something to be desired, the voice acting is tedious at best, and the game is overall to detailed for its own good. its a solid, boring game.
only slightly less disappointing than last hope.

in other news, i have some quite keen little japanese shmups to possibly talk about soon.