paleface [sys=PCE; cat=Shooter_Horiz; reg=JPN] |
| | Super cute horizontal shooter by Naxat Soft. You play a dragon baby with a crush on the hot princess--when a perverted sorcerer shows up and transforms her into a super-deformed toddler, you vow revenge and start killing everything that moves. And a lot moves. Not only do lots of things come at you at once, but when you destroy them a little "pon" explosion carries forward from where they died, and a big fruit springs up out of their body. Fierce enemy onslaughts turn in to impenetrable fruit showers; throw in lots of bullets, a couple floating powerups, a couple options, and a multiple parallax background, and you've got a fiendish amount of activity onscreen. Can the PCE handle it? Well, barring sprite flicker and occasional slowdown, it does okay. The sprite flicker, however, is a problem--at least for me. Lots of times you simply can't see the enemy's bullets over half of their flight path. One eagle boss's projectile quills spring to mind as particularly heinous offenders: the darn things were everywhere, and pretty near invisible. As if to make up for this, the game hands you extra lives like they were going out of style. I've gained about four lives just fighting a single boss. One thing that helps tremendously is that if you have received a weapon powerup, when you get hit you just lose the powerup instead of dying--and powerup-carrying storks fly across the almost constantly, particularly during boss fights. So the game becomes a game of kill the stork, take a hit, kill the stork, take a hit, etc. I have yet to figure out the bomb system. Some of the powerups go in a slot in the upper right-hand corner, and some of these will explode across the whole screen when you push button I. Most won't. It is confusing. I'm not wholeheartedly keen on the rest of the weapon system either. The options and things are okay, but there are about three main weapons to choose from, and you can only have one at a time. Powerup level I think carries across from one to the next, not quite sure about that, but still I wish you could switch between them or something. Oh and the powerup icons toggle between the three as they float along, Raiden-style (see entry 218). Still, fun can be had here in droves. Not a game you can enjoy on a real serious level, perhaps (and no difficulty setting to crank things up a notch, alas), but quite a spectacle for some cute and wild shooting fun now and then. |
|
|
| | While you aren't shooting, your little dragon holds his breath and his face gets all puffy. Fire then and he lets off a big burst shot--handy for using on bosses in particular. |
|
|
| | |