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19th July 2009

Video

Samidare (Stage 3)

I think this is my favourite doujin shmup ever. (And I’ve played a lot of them.) On top of that, I would actually recommend this to someone wanting their first taste of danmaku shooters, since it’s textbook in almost every respect (which is not a pejorative by any means). In far too much detail, here’s why:

• The bullets, while visibly numerous, follow a set pattern, which sounds like it would make it easy, but it doesn’t, because some of them are intricate as fuck, and will take a few tries to find any way to navigate through them. But the important point is that it can be learnt. A lot of shmups outside the bullet hell subgenre, and even some within it, just fire bullets at you seemingly at random, which makes an already hard game even harder.

• It looks hard, but it’s not too hard. A lot of people I’ve tried to turn on to bullet hell have complained it’s too hard after only a few plays. A few plays on this will probably be enough to remember some of the patterns, and you will improve immeasurably. (I didn’t even make it past the first stage without a continue on my first play through. Made it all the way to the boss without losing a life on my second. Piece of cake.)

• There are safe zones. I’m not sure how well this applies to more modern shmups, but there used to be an unwritten code (like bros before hoes) whereby each wave of bullets should have a safe zone that allows you to just sit there perfectly still and watch the bullets stream by. A lot of them seem to be near the bottom of the screen too, which is helpful for less skilled players, who tend to prefer not to venture out of the bottom third of the screen.

• If all else fails, a unique feature of Samidare is the shield system, that I think I’ve only seen in one other shmup. If you press and hold the shield key (X by default; Z to fire by the way, as is standard in these games), a force-field surrounds your ship that reflects any bullets hitting it. Excellent for getting out of a tight spot, even better for doing a lot of extra damage to a boss, and great if you’re a high-score hunter, because it has some kind of combo system associated with it that I don’t fully “get” yet.

• Only three stages. This should be finishable in less than a few hours, even for a first-timer. The difficulty ramps up considerably on the third and final stage, but there’s a practise mode (which all good shmups have) that will let you, well, practise. The nice thing about that is most shmup practise modes (cf. Touhou) don’t let you practise until you beat the stage in-game, which kind of sucks. (Practise in these games is more for bettering your score than figuring out how to beat it. People can get really competitive about their scores.)

• Beating the game unlocks an extra stage (Youtubed here) that is insanely difficult, for the hardcore completionist only. Most games like this tend to have an unlockable super-hard stage or boss. And most people can never dream of actually completing them.

• It’s extremely well made. This is a doujin shmup, which means it was made independently, not by any commercial outfit, yet still rivals the production values of any commercial shmup. To be perfectly honest though, I think these guys tend to stick to a pretty rigid formula; once you’ve played a few different shmups, you’ll notice there’s not a great deal of difference between them.

• It’s free! I think. The game’s website is impenetrable Japanese (as per usual), and I just found a Rapidshare download rather than link-hunting. But, uh, it looks free? (More than happy to furnish you with said Rapidshare link if you pop me an e-mail.) Edit! It’s not free! But as long as you pretend you intend to support the developer eventually, I think it’s ok to steal it. I do not condone this behaviour, obviously. You fucking animal.

If you read this far because you’re actually interested — as opposed to idle curiosity about how long I can actually ramble about a fucking game for — I recommend giving it a go.