TPM CO Soft Works still out there making the best games around.

If Tarotica Voo Doo was about "what's your physical relationship to space in an adventure game", this one's that concept applied to shooting games. "What if you only had one bullet and you had to catch it to keep shooting" is hilarious on its face, but what's special is making it work. And it works! It works so well. Doging bullets and enemies feels so different when you're dodging in all directions trying to get your bullet back, not the specific kind of movement that happens when you're always going forward.

Un mal juego, sin más que aportar. No se siente bien concebido ni lo bastante bien implementado como para que me pueda atraer jugar a más de un par de niveles. Entiendo que hacer una versión propia de Gradius es algo que viene atrayendo a desarrolladores de todo el mundo desde los ochenta, pero el estándar de calidad que el género pone muy difícil a un juego neófito presentarse con una idea original.

-------------------------

A bad game, what can I say. It doesn't feel well conceived or implemented enough to entice me to play it. I understand that making your own version of Gradius is something that has attracted developers from all over the world since the eighties, but the quality standard set out by the genre makes it very difficult for neophytes to come up with an original idea.

This is another Playdate game that probably looked interesting on paper, but really doesn't work in practice. Battleship Godios is a horizontal Shmup, in the same vein as Gradius or R-Type. The game is broken up into short levels featuring only a handful of enemies, where you must expose and destroy their cores to finish the stage. The game's main gimmick is that you only have a finite number of bullets, which fire at 45 degrees and bounce around the stage. They're finite in the sense that you must recollect the bullets as they bounce around before they can be fired again, and if any escape beyond the edges of the screen, they're gone forever. You only start out with two or so, but can find optional upgrades to increase your number. However, if you fail to recapture all of your bullets, you can no longer fire and are effectively screwed. The game does have a rewind mechanic to prevent you from being completely softlocked, but you lose any progress you made when you roll back. As a shmup, the game requires a certain level of dexterity to avoid enemies, but neither the control scheme nor the Playdate's mediocre D-pad are really up to the challenge. As an indie platform, many of the Playdate's games do sometimes feel like quick demos, but none so much as this. Even the artwork, which is usually excellent even on the least noteworthy of Playdate games, is really amateurish here. I think this is probably the first title I've been really disappointed with from the first season, and easily my least favorite Playdate game thus far.

Battleship Godios is a really interesting concept for a game, a shooter where you have to catch your bullet as it bounces around the level - losing it altogether if it goes off-screen. It feels a bit like breakout crossed with a simple 80s shooter.

Each level is fairly short, and the difficulty ramps up quickly. If you get hit, you lose a life but can rewind time using the crank as far back as you like and resume. You can also just rewind time whenever you want, it seems, and with minimal penalty - so if your bullets fly off screen you can rewind time to before you lost them and try again. When you do well (kill enemies fast, clear levels without dying or maybe(?) without rewinding) you are rewarded with lives. It's quite easy to rack up a considerable count of lives in the early few levels, but it's equally easy to lose them all very quickly - especially if you're careless with the rewinds.

Some of the later encounters are very unforgiving, requiring you to move around in tight spaces as the ship you're attacking randomly changes speed. Memorization is basically required, however the game is also very short so that is not too onerous.

Once you've beaten all the levels, the game just loops only this time the enemies are pretty much completely invisible! At this point the game doesn't even try to hide how memorization heavy it is, you literally are just trying to hit invisible targets from your recall of where they were previously. I didn't find this fun, so once I'd run out of lives in this mode I didn't try again.