| paleface [sys=PS2; cat=Shooter_Horiz; reg=JPN] |
| | | Reference added: 345
"Choaniki PS1 and PS2"
Shockingly enough, this isn't a very good game.
In fact I wonder if that's part of the joke. I mean, do the developers even take "seriously" a game about two blatantly homosexual weight-lifters who fly and shoot energy beams out of their sweaty craniums? One would have to guess that it's something of a big laugh. So making the game "good" as a game probably isn't really the point. Which leads me to wonder how these games keep getting made--did the PS1 Choaniki (see entry 345) sell well? How could it have?
A bizarre state of affairs, as is the game itself. This time around you can choose at start between two different formations of your two hunks around the pulsing glob of "protein" (figure that one out yourself). The bodybuilders (Samson and Adon by name) block incoming bullets from striking the divine protein glob but in doing so lose a little of their own energy--if they lose too much, they sort of stand (well, lay) aside and stop blocking shots. You can power them and their beams back up by picking up glowing orange "P" spheres dropped by destroyed enemies.
The formation switching is about twice as much gameplay as the original had, but the thing is that the game just isn't all that... gay, I guess. I mean the first one had guys tanged together as male pogosticks, a mountain of halfnaked men as a boss, and various other configurations of flaming man-meat. So far I've mostly seen random weirdness in character design rather than calculatedly amusing homosexuality--in this game you run across fish with man-legs, big spiders, etc. Snuh.
Also they of course had to go 3D and that's not against my morals or anything but did they really have to make the enemies switch in and out of the foreground plane in subtle and hard-to-spot ways? So you can never really be sure if something is going to hit you or if its just part of the scenery. And then they go and drop boulders right down on your protein sack at lighting speed with absolutely no warning. Not too fun. And stuff doesn't really make sounds or anything as you hit it, which is especially unsatisfying against the ridiculously healthy bosses.
The game is hard (difficulty-wise, too) but not exactly in a fun way. The huge sprites of Adon and Samson simply can't get around some of the massive 3D obstacles or bullet spreads, so they just get hit. Bosses will suddenly twitch across the screen at blinding speed with no warning, smash right into you, and that is that.
Sound and graphics are quite weak, and here's where I started to think that it must have been at least partially intentional. After all, no publisher in their right mind would turn out a "serious" game that had these garage production values. The bosses sometimes whip out a serious-looking bullet pattern but it's serious as in seven-years-ago serious.
So yeah, it's a big joke, but not really as clever as the last one, and not really worth paying full price for. Hopefully the next one will be gayer and more enjoyable at the same time. |
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| | | | The title translates, I'm told, so something like "Mighty Brothers: Legend of the Holy Protein." |
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| | | | There are no options aside from picking your difficulty and formations at startup, and the game doesn't support any kind of two-player, which you'd really have thought would have been an obvious thing to have. |
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| | | Thanks to Zigfried's review at GameFAQs for pointing out that if you play with a DualShock, waggle the right stick for a while and then press it in, your two musclemen release a joyous spew of white hot energy from the hole in the top of their heads. Depending on how much you built it up, this lasts for a few seconds, then sort of trickles down slowly.
Sounds amusing for obvious reasons but it takes a lot of waggling to build up anything decent, and waggling while trying to dodge bullets using the thumbpad is not fun. Plus this is a 2D shooter, I want to play it with my arcade stick, darn it! So now we can lump a convoluted control scheme for a limp super move on top of this game's other woes. |
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