We try to do everything we can to support shmups here at Robot Panic/Drunken Gamers Radio. Well, now’s our chance to put our money where our mouths are as Kotaku has broken the news that Cave’s new sequel to Mushihimesama will in fact be region free.
“We had a lot of good feedback from overseas users,” [Cave's Makato] Asada told Kotaku, happy with the strong response to the insect-themed, vertically-scrolling shmup. “So for this time, as a test, we’re going to make the game region free so that overseas users can play it.”
“By making Mushihime-sama Futari region-free, what we’re doing is measuring the amount of overseas users,” Asada explained. And if you care about your Cave shooters, it’s probably a good idea to import a copy. Or two.
“This will have a direct impact on whether Espgaluda II and other titles will be localized for America,” Asada warned us. “So it’s probably a good idea to pick it up!”
You hear that? Espgaluda II will be impacted by the sales of Mushihimesama Futari 1.5.
So please, support the cause by pre-ordering Mushihimesama Futari 1.5 through your favorite import store. Play-Asia has the pre-order here for $68.90.
You like yourself some shoot-ing-shoot-ing-shooting games? No idea how this event has even hung on this long, but it’s still around and it still wants you to play with it.
Shooting Game Tournament 2009 is a friendly score competition among users of shmups.com. The score validation works like in the hi-score threads. You just play the game on PCB, emulator or any console port and post your score which you don’t need to prove. ANYONE CAN JOIN!
Contestants are broken up into teams by choice or assigned. Over a hundred people compete in teams from all over the world. There have been full teams from Italy, UK, Sweden, Brazil, Japan, Canada, France, and other countries I’m not thinking of. People still come out of the woodwork to attend this. It’s an interesting event and one of if not the best thing going for the shmups community. The big changes this year are no voting for the upcoming game and there is no break in-between games. It’ll be six weeks of five games played on mega-illegal-fun MAME. Players submit scores by posting in a designated thread. You can choose to play as much or as little as you want. No need to register with friends. Come with people or come alone. You play your cards and the organizers will sort you out.
Players can sign up by going to this thread, sign in, quote the 2nd post of the thread, fill out the entry form, then post it in the thread. People are around to help out if you don’t understand. Don’t be afraid, child. Compete. No need for skill levels. Everybody of all types welcome you with open arms; some with more gin on their breath than others.
Registration period is now. The shooting begins August 31st.
I do believe this also means Robot Panic turned one year old recently. Congrats to the three deans for not stumbling drunk and accidentally shutting the site down for 365 days. They should make a ceremonial chip for accomplishments like that, like sobriety periods.
Xbox 360 disc. $20. Three games: Raiden Fighters 1, Raiden Fighters 2, Raiden Fighters Jet. 5-8 Stages each. Two-Player dualplay (co-op), local only. Everything comes unlocked. 8-16+ Selectable ships. Detailed video settings (Scanline config, Tate, etc.). Caravan Mode/Score Attack, Boss Rush Mode, and Leaderboards with two difficulties per mode for all games.
Replays recordable, viewable from leaderboards, and savable to hard drives. Replays include fast-forward feature, but not rewindable.
Worth the price?: One of the best gaming deals, period! Very Much Recommended: Literally everybody. Yes, even a host from Gamers With Jobs. Shocking! Not Recommended: Anybody who absolutely cannot stand the Shooting Game genre for significant reasons. If you’re on the fence about the genre, that doesn’t count; buy this game. It’s the perfect place to begin or re-experience the genre.
Armed Police Batrider fans, get the hell over here, send Valcon some thank you letters for flying this west, and celebrate with case of (ugh!) Busch. This here is a party in a box for some frugal-ass gamers.
Raiden is a shoot-em-up series known for its slow pace, those bastard sniper helicopters, and the crazy fun purple laser. It’s usually enjoyed by gentleman with or without top hats and extremely dedicated “retro” gamers alike. But this is the Raiden Fighters series we’re talking about. Imagine the original Raiden series being a wine and cheese party somewhere in The Hamptons with detailed, frilly decorations hosted by Hugh Laurie and populated entirely by (the better) B-list celebrities but without Bruce Campbell. Now envision the Raiden Fighters series being Lil’ Jon crashing that party with the entire East Side Boyz crew, T.I., Akon, Michael Vick, a just-escaped O.J. Simpson, 17 Strippers, a bigass strobe light, Rasheed Wallace, Chuck Norris, Norm MacDonald, somebody in a big-ass Tinkerbell costume, Soulja Boy, and Vanilla Ice holding turntables and a pound of pure mixed with speed and adderall.
I got some epilogues to shmuppreciation month. One is this dohicky. There’s like, six sites now that break down shooting game news since Danmaku-gata, the once great king of the shooting news blog took a nosedive. Much of that news, like a NeoGAF thread, gets buried in whining and paragraphs about scanlines. Other chunks of the new shit passes by much of Kotaku’s nets. Furthermore, a lot of old great references need a good ‘ol fashioned bookmarking. All people really need are references and name drops in a genre like this. That’s what this here news feed’ll give you. There’s a few people workin’ the post button on that scene: Megalixir, Postman, GaijinPunch, and Meself. Follow the cause if you’d like, RSS dat shiz, or just run though those other forum discussions manually. You got choices, kids.
You probably saw the title for this and you’re wondering if you read things right. Yes, games do exist for the Zune, there may only be a handful available at the moment, but one of them is indeed a shmup! Now it’s obvious the Zune doesn’t hold a candle to what seems like an infinite amount of games that are available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but last fall Microsoft released a smidgin’ of games free of charge for the Zune to at least show that gaming on the Zune is possible. So alongside other monumental releases like Checkers and Sudoku, Microsoft released a top-down shmup in the form of the aptly titled Space Battle. Let the shmuppreciation begin…..sort of.
If you’re wondering how it’s possible to control a shmup on the Zune, the developers made the most of what they could work with. Depending on your model of Zune, the d-pad/scroll pad is used to maneuver your spacecraft from side to side, and the play/pause button is used to launch bombs. That is all, and I’m not kidding. Oh yeah, I’m guessing you may be curious on how to execute a basic firing command, the programmers got around this by having your ship set to auto fire at all times. I was slightly perplexed when I first fired up Space Battle and noticed I had no control over the firing, and wished the rate of fire was at least a little more on par with the craziness I’m use to playing in past shmups.
I eventually warmed up to this gameplay design, and gliding over power ups for double and triple thankfully helped get the controls around the Zune’s limitations. My only gripe is that maneuvering the ship can be a little too sensitive with the Zune’s scroll pad. I own an 80gb Zune, and while I was starting to get the hang of things, one quick little slip-up on the Zune’s scroll pad instantly resulted in the loss of a credit.
For being a free shmup on the Zune, Space Battle has a surprising amount of content. Now it’s not an Ikaruga-caliber experience by any means, but on the flipside it’s not the single level tech demo I thought it would be going in. There are several stages of shmup goodness to unlock, aforementioned power-ups that help tremendously in boss encounters, jukebox functionality to listen to your own songs and podcasts during gameplay and the ability to upgrade your ship between levels.
Of the few games available for the Zune, Space Battle is easily the showcase of the Zune’s graphical capabilities. While the 3D models for your ship and enemies are only on par with shmups from around the 32-bit era, everything has a clean look to it, and the final boss defeat animations do have that genre trademark big explosion. The developers also took the time to add in some snazzy backdrops, which is a little surprising considering I went in expecting nothing more than the Galaga treatment with a smacking of stars making up a majority of the background.
I’m guessing the iPhone/iPod Touch has a better offering of shmups on its platform, but closet Zune owners at least have a competent shmup they can claim as their own, and for free no less! Space Battle could have easily been a rushed together piece of scrap metal thrown up on the Zune Marketplace, but instead winds up a surprisingly playable, and dare I say fun, experience.
Being a devout Turbografx fanboy, I am naturally an admirer of Hudson’s Takahashi Meijin. The inspiration for Adventure Island’s protagonist Master Higgins, Takahashi is somewhat of a legend in Japanese gaming, famous not only for Adventure Island, but also for his uncanny gamings skill. In addition to being Hudson’s spokesperson, Takahashi is known for his ability to press a controller button sixteen times in one second. That’s right: 16 times.
What, that doesn’t impress you? You think you can do better? Well, chump, prove it with Hudson’s Shooting Watch.
Available from NCSX.com for just over $20, this little controller-like device will measure your shooting speed, allowing you to compare yourself to the master. After opening the package, I was eager to see how I stacked up. (more…)
We’re big fans of the space shooter genre and these days, there seems to be a much needed resurgence.
Well, it seems that one of the stalwart shmup franchises has recieved a killer sequel in Japan. Released today, Thunderforce VI is poised to bring back all the things we love about this series to the PS2. This Technosoft shmup monstrosity has been a long time in coming with a lot of hopes and prayers to the shooter gods behind it. Thanks to the good folks at Sega, it’s finally available and everyone is pretty damn excited that we’re finally seeing a release. Here’s hoping it hits stateside in the near future.
You can check out all kinds of awesome talk about this title over at the shmups.com forums. That’s where the SCIENCE lives, my friends. So, for all you lucky bastards with Japanses PS2′s, some importation is in order.
Tondog fills us in on a fantastic new freeware shmup!!
Genetos Takes You Through The Evolution Of Shmups
Once in a great while, I’ll play an indie game so polished and fun, that I must share it with the world. One such game is Genetos, a game mentioned on the Bytejacker video podcast.
Genetos is a shmup unlike any other you’ve played. It’s a trip down the evolution of shmups, with each stage playing like a different game/era in the history of the genre. There are four stages right now (with more to come in the future): Space Invaders, Galaga, a Raiden type level, and Bullet Hell. What makes this game so great is that each stage does not feel like a cheap imitation of the game/era it is paying homage to, but rather like you are really playing it. In each stage of the game, when you destroy an enemy ship it will drop a green orb. Collecting these orbs fills up an experience meter at the bottom. When you reach the top of this meter, your ship’s abilities will evolve into the next stage of shmups. For instance, you start out as a ship from Space Invaders and are only able to fire one shot at a time and move horizontally. When you upgrade, you get to move vertically, get rapid fire and bombs. As you move on in the game, you will get a wider spread shot, the ability to reflect bullets back at enemies by grazing them and a homing laser.
The game is not complete yet. Tatsuya Koyama, the game’s developer, is currently in development on a 5th level that will be added to the game at a later date. I for one am fucking pumped to see what that final stage will be like. If it’s anything like the four he’s designed so far, it will be fantastic.
We try to do everything we can to support shmups here at Robot Panic/Drunken Gamers Radio. Well, now’s our chance to put our money where our mouths are as Kotaku has broken the news that Cave’s new sequel to Mushihimesama will in fact be region free.
Xbox 360 disc. $20. Three games: Raiden Fighters 1, Raiden Fighters 2, Raiden Fighters Jet. 5-8 Stages each. Two-Player dualplay (co-op), local only. Everything comes unlocked. 8-16+ Selectable ships. Detailed video settings (Scanline config, Tate, etc.). Caravan Mode/Score Attack, Boss Rush Mode, and Leaderboards with two difficulties per mode for all games.
I got some epilogues to shmuppreciation month. One is 
