"Shooting game never die."

It is the words that modern classic shmup Crimzon Clover leaves you with. It's a telling turn of phrase that has become somewhat memetic within the STG community - putting in so few words how the genre has persisted despite what would be kind to call limited commercial success for going on 30 years now. The fact that in the year 2023 Toaplan have revived and are probably working on a Truxton/Tatsujin 3 whilst something like starcraft is dead as a dornail is frankly, a bit stupid.

And maybe there is something intrinsic to the genre when it comes to that. Shmups can be made with tiny teams, fast and cheaply. Possibly the most famous shmup - Ikaruga - was born out of a side project at Treasure when two devs had finished their work on Sin and Punishment and finished in 6 months, for instance.

But that's not really why. It's passion. Passion like Kenta Cho's.

just... look at all this.. This list of free, well designed, generally quite good games feels absolutely endless. Most are shmups or at least shmup related - see the excellent Charge shot which is an abstraction of the charge shot from R-type made into a game all of it's own - and that's what he does. The vast majority of his games are about exploring a single mechanic. Combine that with the sheer volume and it's easy to imagine it all as a bit dry, but Kenta Cho is a man with the design craft of the classics and is always super distinctive about it all. In an interview, bizzarely with MTV, the interviewer states he could be a very rich guy - and you can tell that the creative chops and talent he's got for pure game design and coming up with wild concepts could have lead him to great success commercially - but it's not what he wants.

What he wants is to make stuff like Torus Trooper. By his standards, it's a complex game. It's 3D for one thing, the intersection of Nichibitsu's old Tube Panic combined with the franticness of Tempest (I feel there's a little of jeff minter's games in here in particular), with a bit of sanvein thrown in there. Go down the tube fast as fuck killing everything to gain time against an ever decreasing clock, and when time runs out it's over. As ever with Cho, the core hook here is absolutely tantilising. The sense of speed is utterly insane and the game goes well beyond what it feels it should. You can go so fast the game becomes barely legible, but you're rewarded for it tangibly with points and the game has a few neat tricks in regards to things like it's hit detection (you will never get hit by a triangle bullet at high speed) and spawns to keep you going. Eventually it will look like a game being played in fast forward. Jeff Minter's games love the phrase "feed your head to the web" and Kenta Cho truly taps into that hyper-immersive quality of a great tube shooter like Minter does.

I don't think it's his best game though. The ability to control your actual acceleration i feel neuters the game a bit even if after a while you're just going to be holding up, and the charge shot/brake thing is a little off. It's used to score points but also acts as a brake but you can also control your ship's speed anyways, and slowing down also decreases your ability to get time extends from just going fast. It's not a huge issue but in a game so bare it just puts the game a little below the gloriously well designed Tumiki Fighters and Rrootage, games that exemplify Cho's "One thing well" philosophy.

But what I really love about Torus Trooper, Tumiki Fighters, all of Cho's work, is his practices. All his games are free for one, which is nice, but better, they're all completely open source. If I wanted to, he would have absolutely no problem with me taking this game, fixing my personal issues with it, and selling it for like $5 on the switch eshop, without paying him a cent. Hell, this seems to be what he wants - every single scrap of media about him shows a lovely guy who adores making games and wants to help others to make games. His github has loads of useful tools that prospective shmup devs can use to construct their own games. Especially in his earlier years around when TT came out, he was an exceptionally valuable and influential resource to the programmers that are now making the new wave of great shmups.

Perhaps the greatest testament that he's in it for the love of the game is Blast works for the Wii, which is essentially an expanded version of Tumiki fighters developed by a small iowan team called budcat, introducing an editor and the ability to make new stages and stuff (which itself kinda feels like the developers carrying on a bit of Cho's ideals). The end result is pretty great. And Kenta Cho refused to be paid a cent. In fact, the game contains his biggest and best games - Torus Trooper, Tumiki Fighters, Gunroar and Rrootage as unlockable bonuses.

Cho has a level of idealism and love for the genre, and for game development as a whole that I can barely understand.

We do not deserve him.

Shooting game might never die. But it should not be forgotten that longevity isn't because shmups are blessed, or just the best, though they are. It's because of people like Kenta Cho, and others I could go on about for a good while (Masato Maegawa, Kazuki Kubota, Naoki Horii, Rin Hamada, ZUN, countless indie devs). People who have worked their absolute hearts out to keep the torch lit and pass it on, often at the expense of commercial and critical success. I only hope your favourite genre has people like them.

"Normal mode is super cool. I wonder what Extreme is like, let's check it out!"

And now I'm different.

This game rules.

     ‘I want everybody to know the fun of developing a game. If it becomes easier, more people can enjoy it.’

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Jan. 3 – Jan. 9, 2023).

Kenta Cho is known as one of Japan's most prolific independent developers, alongside Ikiki. A visit to his website shows hundreds of games, created over the last decades. Perhaps because it is a hobby for the one working at Toshiba, his various titles are always experimental, to the point where they have an almost scientific quality to them, like successive dives into the recesses of game design to find, ultimately, something new. This is all the more remarkable given that all of his work is open source, to the extent that his idea for Tumiki Fighters (2004) was the unquoted inspiration for Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy (2008). Cho anchors his experiments to the exploration of concepts borrowed from the arcade or from daily life. The Kibasen takes the eponymous activity beloved by Japanese children and uses doodles as graphics, emphasising the naivety of the idea. The River Meguro invokes the image of cherry blossom petals floating on the surface of the water during the spring hanami.

Torus Trooper is perhaps more prosaic in its inspiration. It derives from the tube shooter concept introduced by Tempest (1983) for the arcade. The principle is to place the player on the inner surface of a cylinder – or torus – allowing them to move around very freely, while remaining confined within the geometric space of the level. In Tempest's heyday, the graphics were based on metal wires. For technical and ergonomic reasons, it was decided to keep the camera fixed, because rotating the level would make the player feel nauseous. For others, the notion of having a fixed ship and sliding the level was significant, giving rise to titles like Tube Panic (1984), N2O: Nitrous Oxide (1998) or iS – internal section (1999).

Kenta Cho's title follows this general premise, but injects a new spin on it with its staging. The emphasis of the game is on speed, and to emulate the effect, the stage is just a section of a tube, so that some stretches are open and look like a conventional track. Since the rest of the level can be seen on the horizon, the curves fly by at breakneck speed as the player tries to avoid the various opposing projectiles however they can. There's no question of going slowly, as the game is about survival. The timer runs out continuously and the only way to add precious seconds is to finish a level or kill a boss. This design pushes the player to speed up, whatever it takes, swept away by the sensation of velocity and the psychedelic music.

Torus Trooper succeeds in remaining perfectly readable – the choice of polyhedra, reminiscent of Geometry Wars (2003), to represent projectiles and enemies works wonderfully – despite the intense on-screen action, owing to the clever placement of the camera, which pulls back and fixes on the horizon as the player accelerates. Hitting the railings never slows down the player and it helps maintain a rare speed frenzy. In this respect, the title is much more akin to F-Zero GX (2003) than iS – internal section. There's something magical about breaking 6,000 km/h and driving through projectile barrages as if they were nothing: it's the same feeling as being on a bullet train and seeing the landscape go by very slowly, because it's so far away, while the electricity pylons, much closer, go by at full speed. Torus Trooper has such a unique cathartic quality, almost inviting contemplation: the transitions between levels only alter the music and the colour of the tube, but the shift in tempo is so pleasing.

The concept is flawless and is seamlessly implemented. In addition to standard blasts, the player can use the alternate shot, which pulverises incoming enemy projectiles into dust and explodes at its point of impact. Something about the flow of this attack is incredibly pleasing and works every time. It's hard to pinpoint what in Torus Trooper works so well. The game's design is minimalist and elegant: it reminds me of the Montreal's Biosphere (1967), whose steel structure is surprisingly simple, hiding no artifice from the visitor. Torus Trooper's little lie may be that it doesn't appear to be a torus; but who knows? The infinity of the layout and the random generation of curves and enemies make it impossible to be sure of this fact, and there is a poetry in imagining that the ship is just running on the same loop until the timer stops. In a way, the game would seem to be vain; or rather, the point is simply to have fun. In Kenta Cho's own words: "it is very fun to think about a new game mechanism in my head but that is not enough to test whether a player is going to have fun, playing that game' [1]. This centrality of enjoyment strikes as the primary strength of Kenta Cho's titles and Torus Trooper is perhaps one of his most accomplished manifestations of this idea.

__________
[1] Quote Unquote, The Last and Final Word: Kenta Cho, consulted on January 3, 2023.

Una de las cosas que menos se comenta y que diferencia Space Harrier de sus imitadores es uno de los usos más expresivos de la cámara en videojuegos. Mover el stick cambiaba en un segudo la perspectiva. Tocabas tierra y la sensación de velocidad aumentaba con el horizonte a tu altura; subes y el campo crece, se amplia a vista de pájaro. Es el juego de cámara de Yu Suzuki lo que cohesionaba resto de elementos (su fantasía a lo flash gordon, su música melódica, sus suelos ajedrezados, sus ciudades imposibles en el horizonte...), sujetos todos a la sensación de velocidad conseguida. Porque bajar la cámara significa sacrificar claridad por emoción y cuando te dan la opción lo sientes como una temeridad. Son los videojuegos cumpliendo la fantasía de viajar a velocidades imposibles y meterte en un estado de reacción instintiva, donde acelerar se vuelve una necesidad y te ves esquivando cosas que no te explicas ni como. Estilo sobre sustancia en el mejor de los sentidos.

In Torus Trooper, the only difference between the Normal, Hard, and Extreme modes, as far as I can tell, is their speeds. The tempo of the pumping, genre-hopping rave soundtrack scales proportionally, as well. It loves the speed.

Torus Trooper's purpose is to suspend the player in an intense state of heart palpitation until their puny ship bursts on impact from a piece of space debris, or until the timer runs out.

Just like real life and soccer, the time ticks until there is no more. Like soccer, more can be added if deemed necessary. Like real life, some can be subtracted if one accidentally hurts themselves. The felixibility of the time limit affords the player constant flashes of hope and disappointment which, in the end, lead to greater heart palpitations.

cool game

It's 3 AM, it's been a really rough night for Captain Falcon, he is so mad! Why is Captain Falcon so mad?! I'll tell ya why he's mad, and it's because this game wasn't the final chapter of F-Zero GX story mode, that's why he mad.

Whoosh zoom, there I go. Pew pew BOOM, there you go. GOT YOU!!

Eat my goddamn dust ya wireframe wimps! See ya on the flip side...

slips sunglasses on and drives off