Cactus! Cactus! You wicked alchemist, you mercurial son of a bitch! You're too fucking good!
This is a shmup made in 12 hours that can be played in a minute. It's the latest in a long series of shmups made by this prickly, lone genius that takes a tired genre and deconstructs it with the delicate care of a surgeon back by generous morphine. Have you ever tried morphine? I worked at a hospital one summer... that first minute, its like this game.
Spare graphics, vector-drawn, black and white shapes. You can attack weakly with the Z key at a constant, metronomic beat, but bombs and defense only work every few seconds. You end up playing DDR with your fingers while dodging bullets. Imagine Everyday Shooter pared down to the base concept. Bueno.
This is the third game I've
This is the third game I've played that I'd put into the category fo "music shooter", along with Rez and Beat It.
There are sub-genres that
There are sub-genres that get crowded, derivation among innovation; is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think its pretty good. I mean, why not?
Eh
I had a very hard time playing this. There seems to be no manual, and just a couple of cryptic instructions the very first time you start up the game (and ONLY that time--unless you delete your minusettings file). The instructions don't tell you that the Enter key starts a new game and that the arrow keys will move your ship, both rather valuable pieces of information. Beyond that, the Z weapon takes a moment to start shooting, the X weapon only works every now and then under mysterious and irreproducible conditions and the C key doesn't do anything (despite being mentioned in the "instructions"). The huge number of bullets also makes it difficult to survive for any length of time. You can learn the patterns after a while (I managed to get to the "boss" pictured in the screenshot), but why would you want to?
I found it not that hard to
I found it not that hard to figure out, given the information in the99th's review. The conditions that make the X and C keys aren't "mysterious and irreproducible". You just have to press them on the beat. If you're playing without sound, this will probably be difficult -- although I notice that the random background shapes pulse a little, so there's at least a little visual indication of when the beats come.
The C key destroys all the bullets on the screen. If you gave up on pressing it during the first pair of ships, I can understand thinking that it doesn't do anything: they don't fire any bullets, so there's nothign for it to destroy. But it's kind of essential for surviving the end boss. In my first attempts, I also used it liberally on the earlier waves, but every beat when you're pressing C is a beat where you're not pressing X and killing stuff, and you need to kill stuff as fast as you can to beat the game before the time limit.
I don't mean to suggest that
I don't mean to suggest that it's a crowded subgenre. Quite the reverse: I'm saying that there are only two other games anything like this. But I suppose that if you start by thinking that there's nothing anything like it, that could sound like calling it derivative. Which it isn't. Even though all three games seem to have a similar goal -- creating a musical/rhythmic experience through shooter mechanics -- they all approach that goal quite differently. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Cactus had never played Rez, and would be very surprised if he had played Beat It. (And I know for a fact that the author of Beat It had never played Rez.)