PC Engine shmupdevs understood the genre sauce but goddamn do a lot of these games totally fail to deliver compelling level design. In hindsight this should be a cool tech demo for the extra boss object scale and parallax you can achieve with the SuperGrafx's extra VRAM power, but it ain't all that great as a shmup. Aldyne's two trains of design are totally incompatible with each other: Enemies that chase you from every direction, and AI-powered options that refuse to do their job correctly. So many microscopic pests killing you from behind because your options didn't happen to be on the same line of sight. There's so many vile candidates for Snowbeast award here: The giant stage 3 cannons that shoot screen-covering lasers, the turrets in stage 4 that only take damage when attacking and also resist most of the weapons, the eels in stage 6 that snipe you while you're stuck to electric walls, but the trophy has to go to the red hoppers in stage 5 that not only divebomb you randomly, but shoot you down if you somehow avoid their headbonks. Had to drop at the last boss because I got there with a weapon that couldn't kill it, and then my checkpoint took me back to an unwinnable spot.

Games like this make me feel a lot less guilty about my Genesis fanboying.