| paleface [sys=X360; cat=Shooter_Vert; reg=JPN] |
| | | This game is region-free, and thus will play on North American Xbox 360s.
"Futari," I guess, is more or less a sequel to the original Mushihimesama (see entry 851), and version 1.5 is...a tweaked version? I dunno.
As in the original, you're a tiny human-like princess (or, here, prince, if you like) of a lush 2D insect kingdom, and you have to go blow up lots of other insects, who are much bigger than you, on your trusty insect steed. They shoot purple ovals, or "bullets" at you, often in ridiculously screen-filling patterns. Fortunately you can shoot later beams back at them, and even drop powerful bombs, of which you have a limited supply. You fly up the screen while the bad guys fly down, and the background scrolls along with you through the five low-res but very colorful and organic-looking stages until you get to the monstrous boss whose body is just as stage-filling as his bullets.
Other versions of Futari are on offer, too; "Black Label" and Death Label" are available as either DLC or a special code offer--I forget which one is which, and I'm not really sure about the differences.
And Futari has three difficulty levels, ranging from insanely hard to welcome-to-thirty-seconds-of-pain. It is a pretty darn difficult game, and it sure looks like a lot of memorization will be necessary--finding and remembering where the enemies come from and where the safe zones in their bullet patterns are--not to mention lightning reflexes, before you can hope to beat the game without pumping it full of continues.
Oh that reminds me, there are online leaderboards of course, and you can download replays, but the interesting thing is that the default mode, which uploads high scores to the leaderboard, doesn't allow continues--which makes sense, but that more harder style of play has usually not been the default. Online leaderboards are a big deal now I guess though, so there you go, progress.
So there are the two characters, each having two different shot types, or something. Not sure if there's an option to rotate the screen sideways so that you can play in sideways full-screen mode like the original arcade, but there probably is. Oh and there are "Arcade" and "Xbox 360" modes, but I'm not sure what the differences between them are.
Apparently there's a scoring mechanism whereby when your score multiplier is one color, or something, using the normal button-tap shot will give you more points, and when the multiplier is another color, using the button-holding shot will give you more points. That seems sort of interesting, but then again not really; I'd rather not feel sort of forced into which shot type I'm using. At least you don't have to juggle things upscreen.
So seems like a good port of another good, very manic low-res 2D arcade shooter by Cave. |
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