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Detana TwinBee Yahoo! Deluxe Pack
  PS1Shooter_VertJ  
  opened by paleface at 00:36:04 08/18/03  
  last modified by paleface at 12:25:50 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Shooter_Vert; reg=JPN]
           
Two vertical arcade shooters by Konami's Parodius team, this should be a great disc, right? Well, I had high hopes. The games are super-cute and spritey with giant fruits, which is all to the good, but some things annoy.
 
For instance Detana Twinbee obviously had a vertical arcade screen (and I suspect that Twinbee Yahoo did as well) but there's no mode that allows you to play with the TV rotated in "tate" mode, you have to play with a shrunk or cut-down screen. Ugh. In both games you get powerups mainly by shooting passing clouds, which releases a bell--shoot the bell until it turns a color other than gold, then pick it up for an effect. The annoying part of this is that generally by the time you've spotted a good color, you've already launched another shot that then hits the bell and the powerup is lost, so you have to juggle it some more until something good comes along, all the while dodging rampaging jackalopes and the like.
 
Both games pull the usual Gradius screw-job of losing all your powerups and leaving you nearly helpless if you die, except that they send you a cloud and you can try to get lucky with some quick colored bells--of course if you're in the middle of a boss battle chances are good that you're going to die going for those bells, but give it a shot anyhow! :P
 
And finally I guess the thing that most irks me is that the games do the old dual-layer Xevious thing, where you have to shoot a gun to hit air targets and drop bombs to hit ground targets. With everything being super bright and colorful it's often hard to distinguish ground vs air quickly and so of course you just mash both shot buttons. Bleh. Oh and then the best part of that is that at least in Yahoo you can actually get a flamethrower weapon that seems great at first but then you realize that it's replaced your bombs and doesn't hit ground targets, so you can't kill ground stuff and get points in the form of the giant fruit that they usually drop, and of course you can't kill them to stop them from shooting at you. Wunderbar.
 
Final annoyances: you can't switch between the two games once you've chosen one short of rebooting the system, and the voices in Yahoo's anime cutscenes play fast and garbled with the PS2's fast loading option enabled.
    
references:
· Pop'n Twinbee (SNES)
· SuperLite 1500 Series: Cotton Original - Fantastic Night Dreams (PS1)
· TwinBee Portable (PSP)
· Twinbee Rainbow Bell Adventure (SNES)

 
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