Not too into this one. It's basically R-Type on crack, usually (if not always) to its detriment. Most notably, it somehow amplifies the difficulty and memorization elements even further, leaving behind a borderline barbaric end result. Stage 7 is probably the stupidest, most unfair level I've played in a shmup thus far. Not helping much is the length, being several stages too many while each one progressively gets longer to begin with. Also similar to R-Type is the visuals and presentation, though it's nothing that the former doesn't do better anyway.

I really don't like the weapon switching either. It reminds me of Hellfire, which was very bad about this in essentially the same way (talked about in more detail here https://www.backloggd.com/u/Jenny/review/456097/).

Overall I'm left kinda disappointed. It's not necessarily bad by any means but it made me wish I was playing various other shmups more to my liking, and I just wanted it to be over even when I was only a little past the halfway point.

I'm tired, boss.

it's waned every now and then, but I think generally it's not a stretch to say the Mega Man X series has done a pretty good job at maintaining and building upon that pitch perfect running-jumping-gunning action that's been established since in that monumental first title. that all of course came to a culmination in x4, what I undoubtably believe to be the best of the X games - and for some, maybe even the best of the whole series - personally I'd give that honor to one of the mega man zero games, but I totally get it, not only does the game play excellently, but the presentation is top notch, gorgeous sprite work... kickass tunes... I think that's half the battle.

in contrast, from the moment you start playing, X5 is immediately much less striking, the music is still really good, one of the game's saving graces, but something about this intro stage feels off. this isn't my first time playing X5 - I briefly attempted to play through the game last year, ended up dropping the game at duff mcwhalen's level but I kind of felt the same then, something about how this game looked always felt off to me. somewhat hot off the heels of my X4 replay I think I can finally put my finger on why... comparing the two's intro stages, so much happens in X4's - neon spotlights illuminating the screen, the city blinking red, green, blue and everything in-between, every building is distinctly shaped, and then in an instant the cool blue tones turn into a fiery red and orange, flames periodically peeking out from plumes of ash, definitely one of those video game environments that got seared into my brain. conversely, X5's intro stage is a garbled mess, the city in the background is blurry, a dull selection of colours hanging over the whole thing - it all blends together, like a pile of junk just hanging in the sky, nothing about the environment particularly sticks out, there's a few trees with blinking lights on them, though the trees themselves look like cardboard cutouts, the skyline is lined with a compressed picture of the clouds, a flat looking bridge that's either really far away or really close - several laws of parallax broken here, and then it all comes together as you fight a pre-rendered statue of liberty sigma.

i wish I could say that the intro stage is the only level that suffers from this, but unfortunately, it's not!!! every level in X5 feels so artificial, the ideas are there, but none of it is given the level of detail and polish it deserves. you could apply this as a blanket statement for the whole game really - I haven't even really talked about the gameplay because what do I say that has not been said in that statement alone? it controls like X4, yeah - follows the general level design conventions of that game, you have a new upgrade system that's just kinda tacked on, cool, sure, it's all there, but none of it is properly fleshed out. calling it underbaked is frankly generous, it didn't even start being cooked, like they were in a rush to just get moving - which considering X6 launching only within a year of this game, they probably were.

my initial review was a lot lengthier and strongly worded, but the more I typed the more I realized that I'm moreso just kind of bummed out at this game as opposed to mad or upset, we don't know a lot about X5's development, besides that inafune wanted it to be the final X game, and it tries, god it really does try to be that epic conclusion, and maybe it could have, had it been given the time and attention it desperately needed, but it wasn't, and this is the game we got. disappointing!

rough and kinda scuffed at times, but it becomes part of the charm. silly yet also impactful. treasure’s 5th gen endeavors interest me most because you could definitely tell they were mainly focusing on experimentation, but to what end? for fun? for something bigger? who knows! all i know is that they enjoyed making cool little unique weirdass action titles, and i enjoy playing them.
sorta like a proto-ikaruga only to a more extreme degree. you have two colors: red and blue. enemies have two colors: red and blue. you can only kill enemies with the opposite color shots, and the enemies can only hurt you with the opposite color shots. simple in concept, but actually playing it is like wrestling a bear. since this is treasure, you can’t just change colors on the fly, oh no. instead you have a corresponding color for each side of your body. wanna shoot blue? face left. wanna shoot red? face right. this essentially turns what would’ve been a basic run-&-gun into an almost puzzle-like platformer. you must have keen spacial awareness and consider your placement on the screen at all times. they will throw enemies of multiple colors at you at once. strategy is key to taking them all out quickly while managing to avoid taking damage yourself.
now, i wouldn’t exactly call this genius but it’s an incredibly interesting gimmick for a game of its nature and, i fuck with it. visually stunning as per treasure standard, utilizing the hardware to its fullest in animating some pristine spritework. the character designs are cutesy while still maintaining that degree of edge to intimidate. silhouette mirage is a very creative game at the end of the day. constantly bombarding you with distinct set-piece after wacky boss after confusingly sweet story beat. an intriguing one, for sure. definitely not for everyone but if you have some tolerance for experimental sidescrollers, give it a go. i honestly might prefer this to ikaruga.

let's make this clear: best shitty dub by a country mile. the usual critique that lines sound recorded out of context alone in a room barely applies here, as it often feels like lines are stitched together from multiple takes or garbled on a practice run. goldman has a gravel to his voice similar to the rubber variety found on a children's playground. NPC voices frequently change the actor between screaming at the zombies to nonchalantly thanking you. some lines barely even make sense. masterclass.

sega does not waste its time designing games by conventional means. hotd2 relies on more potent thrills: zombies spewing viscera, blocky heads exploding, and terrified humans pulled from the jaws of death. unlike its sister series virtua cop, hotd refuses generous indicators around each assailant in favor of a damage system based on which part of the body was targeted. lining up a headshot versus blowing off an arm or unloading a clip in the spongey torso becomes each encounter's lifeblood, all decided within fractions of a second as the next batch of monsters appears before you. learning how each group staggers their attacks or how heterogeneous sets coordinate expands this beyond dispatching single enemies (again a la virtua cop). where the game becomes more surprising is in how it refuses to reuse and reorganize its existing encounter sets later in the game. expect completely new sets of enemies with different rhythms and weak points. even enemies without special traits (projectiles, agile movement, invisibility) still behave radically different based on appearance.

indeed, very few runs of this game are ever the same even with how tightly wound the basic structure and individual encounters are. not only does every level feature a few alternate areas, but the entirety of stages 2 - 4 have alternate entrances / exits with remixed boss fights included. to give the game the benefit of the doubt, this serves as a type of dynamic difficulty. route junctions appear as savable NPCs, where a successful rescue will potentially change the path your own. I would weakly argue that failing these actually increases the difficulty, with the routes you're led upon in these instances being much longer and filled with more dangerous enemies, such as the large burlap-sack wearing brutes who charge / jump-kick you or the occasional zombie with an inexplicably gigantic sword. actually comparing these side-by-side is near impossible though unless you've played the game at least a few dozen times to completion. having played the vast majority of the game around 15 times in the last week and a half for this review, I was still encountering entirely new routes and permutations of rescues up through my final playthrough.

in a sense this is an attempt to mystify what is otherwise an incredibly rote series of canned challenges. trial-and-error rules the day when you're able to establish any sort of consistency here. in theory route-building would be the optimization characteristic of the game, but this is averted by the actual skill of aiming consistently. I once played this on xbox with a light gun at a convention and experienced actual bliss, with reload mapped to a button and aiming feeling naturalistic and accomodating. this not so for the other home versions. hitboxes are often much smaller than indicated or frequently subjected to invincibility, making visual feedback unreliable even when using a wii remote. this is exacerbated by frequently having to aim off-screen to reload, which itself is unreliable as even after calibration the perimeter of your screen causes the reticle to mildly stick when pressed against it. the dreamcast version is very playable on controller with trigger reloading but obviously hampered by its use of an analog stick.

surprisingly I performed about equally as well in both. still, while the game is enjoyable on repeat plays it is not one you will find much growth in with any smaller number of repeated plays. despite having a decent amount of the game memorized by the time I cleared arcade mode today, I don't feel like I really grew as a player outside of unlocking more credits and thus artificially increasing my playtime. there's too many sudden left turns, hitboxes hidden by the HP bar, and split-second decisions to allow someone to casually increase in skill.

it's frustrating, but this is not a single-player linear experience. it's one to pick up with a friend, preferably randomly and without the stakes that comes from individual play. it is the perfect play-before-work or school game; a game that punishes persistence and rewards small victories. this was not designed to form long-term plans around, or to 1CC as a matter of course, or even to enjoy for more than an hour at a time. it's a game to let you briefly wield death at a fingertip, rocketing you through every situation you'd ever want to apply your powers in without a moment to relax. a rollercoaster instead of a steady climb. variety of experience over traditional escalation of a particular conflict arrangement.

Yeah I'm actually with the general consensus on this one, it ain't great. My take's the same as everyone else: The level design's too absent-minded and short, the bosses are bad, and the chaos emerald stages are dumb as hell. I did like this a lot as a kid on the SADX minigames, but I think it was just for the visuals and easy difficulty.

I will say, I don't hate the game's design on paper. I really like the idea of collecting a shitton of rings to access the emeralds and just get warped there: It fixes the problem of accidentally losing your rings before reaching a gate point, and makes it fun to just assimilate a huge pile of rings at once. I got a huge serotonin boost whenever I found a stockpile of ring capsules. Hell, I don't even hate that the levels are easy, I just don't think you can work with easy AND short at the same time in a Sonic space; you gotta just do one or the other, or else things start feeling hollow.

I do like a lot of the music and level locales too: Gigalopolis' shining cyan lights and ramps are a visual treat, Sleeping Egg has a very odd esoteric vibe to it, Mecha Green Hill is a cool take on the (overused) classic, and Aqua Planet's music kicks ass. Even Electric Egg is a tier above GG Sonic's usual final stages.

Idk if that Sonic Chaos fangame is gonna release or if it was just a proof of concept - either way, I'd love to see this game get a second chance.

Me and Micronet have a bit of an odd history, because it felt like I kept stumbling upon their ineptitude out of sheer coincidence or perhaps those above just have contempt for me for reasons only known to them. I played their shitnum opus known as "Heavy Nova" many many moons ago when I first discovered emulation and used Gens as opposed to better things out now like Fusion. It would be a defining moment for what it means to truly be an inconceivable mess deserving of the most amount of scorn possible. If your game is as unplayable as Heavy Nova, or as gross and offensive as Square's Tom Sawyer then it deserves capital punishment to the nth degree, no exceptions.

I've written essays that dragged for way too long on Black Hole Assault (also known as "Butt Hole Assault" in certain circles) and Revengers of Vengeance, meanwhile I simply compared Heavy Nova to a battery acid bath. Needless to say my opinion didn't change when I first joined the site, I doubt it changed now. It was massively funny for me to find out they made a shmup before any of these mistakes of mankind thanks to fellow BL user Jenny, which of course piqued my interest since I'm a weird person who enjoys digging through garbage, because I've explored retro libraries to the point I couldn't care less about so-called "hidden gems" because I've discovered them ten years before Little Joey Baloney on Youtube claimed to find them and made them mainstream and normie.

Upon booting Curse on my handy dandy Everdrive Pro I went into gameplay and thought I was playing an MSX game with how choppy it was running. With some practice I probably could've counted the frames it took for the enemies to cross the screen and do their little choreographed patterns. Needless to say, thanks to this the game was like taking multiple candies from multiple babies. I'm actually ashamed to admit I kinda liked the option system, I'm sure it was hocked from another shmup, and I'm just blanking on where it was from prior since I'm not exactly in my "Cold Comfort Zone" so to speak. I apologize to whom I've alluded to on the off chance they read this.

It's worth note that the game runs so terribly and is so badly optimized that I couldn't pull up the in-game menu of my Everdrive. Which is too bad, because apparently the boys at Micronet realized their game was too easy, and instead of doing a proper difficulty curve they instead made the final stage do an R-Type impression of blasting the player with lasers and changing the rules by making them redo the stage instead of respawning like normally. Save states would've been appreciated, but I guess even my hardware was trying to tell me that this game really wasn't worth the time. A shame too, because I was actually ready to go a bit easier on it, but I guess I really shouldn't be surprised by the lads who thought becoming slower and more useless as you took damage would translate well to enjoyable gameplay in a beat'em up/fighting game. I'm afraid to say Earth Defense/The Earth Defend still sweeps as Curse didn't softlock on me after killing the first boss, nor do the sprites look like a toddler's first outting in MS Paint.

May Micronet's whimper of a legacy carry onward to remind us what garbage truly smells like. For this, I salute you.

Hyperstone Heist is a weird case. It's not exactly another port of Turtles in Time, but it uses a large amount of its assets, and ultimately just makes things a bit confusing. I don't exactly know the reason for this. I'm sure Turtles in Time could have been ported over to the Genesis with very minimal sacrifices, though I'm no expert on the hardware.

Whatever the reason may be, the Genesis got this instead, which is basically the same but with five different, longer levels instead of the original's ten. It also looks a bit murkier as a whole and has an option to make the turtles an uglier shade of green.

This one is damn solid on its own, but really it just makes me wish I was playing its SNES counterpart. I have no idea about the arcade original, I feel like there's a good chance this is an improvement over that if Konami's other arcade beatemups are anything to go by.

In hindsight, just above average, but it's still damn impressive under the context of a handheld shmup in 1991. Nobody was really doing that at the time, let alone this faithfully to the console/arcade experience. All the usual Aleste design trimmings converged over well, down to the expansive weapon array and a lot of stage setpieces borrowed from MUSHA. Where it falters is how mundane it can become: Kinda plodding and easy in a similar way to Megaforce and MUSHA, while also lacking the cinematic elements of those games. It's also just overblown by both its superior sequels.

This is one of those games I didn't know existed till a mutual I know talked about it. I've always thought about trying it since like last year but finally thought about trying it now and it's a pretty interesting game for an early Game Boy game.

So this is a new take on the maze clear game type of gameplay like Pac-Man where you have to put your roller on every spot to pass the level and enemies are going to stop you from doing it. But what makes this one cool is you have magic to use and can really make this one a blast to play especially once you get to use it more.

While the game is pretty fun it does fault in some areas like it just reuses levels for no reason which is really lame and some levels early on can be a pain when you're more limited. It actually gets a lot easier the more magic you get but I honestly really like that. You also have limited continues and that honestly is dumb but I get why they did that.

It's a cute little game to try out if you're ever curious though sadly it's pretty expensive nowadays. The music is also pretty good too so go give the game a try. You might enjoy this game you've never heard of.