wasteblock E17

oh progear you and your nonsense. this shining happy shooter from cave is one of their two shooters notable for their horizontal progression through levels, the other being deathsmiles, a game i have not had the pleasure or ability to play, thanks to microsoft and their region lock. regardless, i do have this game to play, and hate, because i force myself to clear a whole level no deaths before i get to the boss, which at the fourth level becomes ridiculous, and even more frustrating as i nearly cleared it on about my third try but then died a stupid death one ship from the end of the level. that level is particularly frustrating because as the game is horizontal, cave was like "hey lets up the difficulty and make this level vertical" and some programmer was like "you know, i dont want to code in a function where you turn vertical ill just leave the ship and its bullets sideways." thanks guy. yes you remain sideways, relying heavily on your hold shot and possibly your wide shot, should you have chosen the first pilot. if you try and play the level like a vertical shooter, the game ganks you with bottom spawns that actually fire offscreen into you should you sit at the bottom of the level to dodge bullets. that and a fairly ambiguous hitbox make this level a multifaceted bitch. the game itself is pretty okay, not my favorite cave, but then ive said all this before though now i am actually assesing gameplay aspects to make this blog more interesting. the scoring system is pretty rad, hold shots producing gems and normal shots producing rings, with bombs depleting scores but giving you upwards of 20,000 points should you hold on to enough of them. ive also been toying with player combinations, "gun"+ "nail" being my original preference, though ive been trying to branch out to others, using the weaker wideshot "ring" + with the slowpowerful "rivet" which is both helpful and not. the real benefits to the combinations are combining a normal speed and slowed speed that are comfortable, as it seems each combination has a different slowshot speed, missles being the slowest and my least favorite. the art is okay, its a little too anime for me but i suppose they can't all have giant catspiders. a good game, one i wil continue to observe and force myself to fail at.