War: The Final Assault (Arcade)

I'll start this post with a disclaimer: this game isn't emulated perfectly in MAME by a long shot, and while the original cabinet uses some buttons and a big gun handle-shaped analogue stick for controls, I had to make do with a Dual Shock 4 and jimmying together some controls that were pretty close to a modern first person shooter through trial and error. Since it would be unfair to comment on the quality of the game under these circumstances, consider this post as being for informational purposes only.

As far as I can tell, though, it's a pretty good attempt at bringing contemporary console first person shooters (circa 1999, when the game was released) to the arcade! I only played the single player mode, though it seems that it has both co-op and versus multiplayer modes, judging by the attract mode demos and the high score tables. Single player mode has you going through stages killing lots of enemy soldiers and robots. Sometimes you'll get to pick up a more powerful weapon, which is nice, too, and there's a fair few different kinds. Also, when you kill human enemies with an explosive weapon, they burst into chunks of meat, which is also nice.

The game's set in futuristic Siberia, and your enemies are a kind of generic bad guy army that takes vidual cues from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, though judging by some of the names of later stages seen on the highscore tables, it looks like aliens get involved later on, too. Visually, the game looks great: everything's huge and colourful and chunky, and there's cool propaganda posters on the walls too. The robot enemies are a bit boring, though, which is a shame as the human enemies look alright, despite being a bit generic. Though there was apparently a scrapped N64 port in the works, the whole time I was playing, the thought that ran through my mind was that it looked like a lot of western-developed Dreamcast games. Of course, it didn't get ported there, either.

As for how it plays, it's a mixed bag. I do like the linearity of the stages, and the fact that there's big red arrows telling you where to go, as something that's always frustrated me in single player FPSes is getting lost in the stages. I don't know why, but it always seems to happen! One thing I really didn't like though, is that there's quite a few bullet sponge enemies, and they only get more frequent as the stages go on. I only played until the fourth boss, and by then, just getting through each room was becoming laborious.

Though I was essentially playing it at half speed, thanks to a combination of the emulation being in its early days, and my laptop not particularly being a powerhouse (though I don't know if it runs faster on more powerful computers, or if we will just have to wait for the emulation to get slowly closer to perfection), I mostly enjoyed War: The Final Assault. It's colourful, there's explosions and stuff, and there aren't many arcade games like it. (Off the top of my head, I can think of Last Survivor, Outtrigger, and that Counterstrike arcade game?) Try it, I guess, see how you get on.

Ordyne (PC Engine)

Not every game has to be original to be fun,a fact that definitely works in Ordyne's favour. Though Namco's output in the late 80s was mostly pretty varied (something that shows in the massive array of PC Engine games they released in the console's early days, most of which were pretty unique in some way, and most of which were also really high quality. Making it so much stranger that they didn't release any PC Engine CD games, as far as I know), Ordyne is a game that's clearly very heavily influenced by SEGA's Fantasy Zone.

For a start, it's a cute, cartoony shooting game, though to be fair, that was a pretty popular thing at the time, and Ordyne isn't as strange or psychedelic as Fantasy Zone. The real similarities lie in its actual mechanics. Firstly, you have a straight forward shot fired with one button, and a bomb that drops down from the front of your ship fired with the other, and like in FZ, playing this game without a turbo controller will build up massive muscles in your right arm as you try to shoot fast enough to get through the enemies. For some reason, Ordyne starts giving out a lot of bullet sponge enemies that take a ton of punishment from the second stage onwards, which is never a good thing.

THe other big thing taken from Fantasy Zone is the item shop. I know bombs and item shops are fairly common things in this era, but both of them together in a horizontally-scrolling cute-em-up just feels like too big a set of coincidences. The shop does work a little differently to FZ's shop, though. While Fantasy Zone and its sequels have every item available throughout the game as long as you've collected enough money for them, each time the shop appears in Ordyne, there's only three non-randomly selected items available. Also, when you by a weapon, its use is limited by time, not by how many time you fire it (just like in Fantasy Zone).

To be fair to Ordyne, it's not totally a rip off of Fantasy Zone. It's one-way forced scrolling, as opposed to FZ's Defender-style free roaming style, for example. More interestingly, there's the occasional appearance of the Dream Company, which allows you to gamble 1000 crystals for the chance to win either a power up or a larger amount of money, and other such prizes. I'm not sure if it's possible to lose at this, since t hasn't happened to me yet. Maybe I've just been very lucky, but still, if you see the weird clock guy floating around, approach him.

Ordyne might not be an original game, and there are definitely much better PC Engine shooting games in the same price range, but it's still a pretty good game. I wouldn't bother actively seeking it out, but if you see a copy on sale at a slightly lower price than usual, you probably won't regret picking it up.

TH Strikes Back (Arcade)

You might remember a few years ago, I reviewed a Spanish arcade game entitled Thunder Hoop. Well, the TH in this game's title stands for the same thing I guess, since this is the sequel to it. Like its predecessor, it's about a guy who looks a lot like Son Goku (though this time round, it's more of a "Dragonball Z as drawn by Rob Liefeld" kind of Goku than the original game's shorter, more cutesy Dragonball style) running around platform stages shooting stuff.

Unlike the original though, TH Strikes back has less of an Amiga/Microcomputer feel to it, having a much faster pace, and more of an influence from console games as well as its arcade peers. There's generally a lot less careful platforming in this one, as you storm ahead as fast as you can, constantly shooting the many crowds of one-shot enemies, making you feel like the super-powered fighter your character resembles visually. The game has the "semi-auto" shooting, where you can shoot as fast as you can press the button, which is always satisfying, especially during boss fights. All in all, it's generally pretty fun to play. If you like Contra or Metal Slug and want a not-quite-as-good-but-still-pretty-good alternative, TH Strikes Back is a decent enough effort in that regard.

With the talk of the actual mechanics out of the way, I want to talk about the game's graphics. I've already mentioned the main character being a bit unoriginal, but the enemies are all pretty interesting. There's weird biological horrors, sleek, shiny sci-fi women who look like they've been ripped from the cover of an issue of Heavy Metal, floating cast-offs from The Real Ghostbusters, and even weirder biological horrors. The backgrounds are nice, too, being a mix of standard sci-fi spaceships and tech along with some shameless Giger-cribbing. All the enemies also have unique deatth animations, which for the most part have them exploding, spreading their innards all over the place, but special note should be made of the aforementioned sci-fi women, who upon death, inflate until they burst. I'll give the developers the benefit of the doubt since this game came out in 1994, but in our post-deviantart 2018 world, it does seem like that might have been some fiendish, perverse animator catering to his own special interests on the sly.

There's another cool little touch that kind of covers mechanics and aesthetics at the same time: enemies generally don't instantly kill you on touch. Bullets and other projectiles they shoot do, but the enemies themselves will instead initiate some attack when they touch you, and if you're quick enough, you can kill them before they actually pull the attack off and kill you. Like the death animations, those are all different for each enemy too. Lots of attention to detail in this game all round, which is a nice surprise when you consider that a lot of western-developed arcade games are just ugly, cheap cash-ins with the minimum effort put in.

TH Strikes back isn't going to change your life, and there's lots of better games in the genre, but it's still got enough going for it that you should at least play a few credits and have a look for yourself.

Cosmic Epsilon (NES)

When it was released in 1985, Space Harrier was one of, possibly the most graphically impressive videogame that had ever been released up until that point. It would obviously, then, be absurd to try and match it on an 8-bit home console originally released in 1983, even with a few more years of advancement in programming know how. And Cosmic Epsilon is no exception to that: it looks nowhere near as good as arcade Space Harrier. It is still one of the most graphically impressive Famicom games I've ever seen, though, and it does have one cool little trick that Space Harrier doesn't. But I'll get back to that later.

As you've probably worked out, 1989's Cosmic Epsilon is an into-the-screen sprite scaling-style shooting game (though since it's on the Famicom, it has to fake the sprite scaling, though that's no point of shame: remember that Space Harrier II on the Mega Drive had to do the same). You fly forwards, shooting enemies and avoiding their shots, of course. There's a couple of extra gameplay gimmicks in there too, compared to Space Harrier, like the ability to charge up your weapon, making your shots more powerful for a few seconds, as well as a limited use missile weapon that's presumably more powerful, but never seems to hit anything, so we'll never know for sure.

I've read a few other reviews of this game dotted around the internet, and one thing always seems to come up: the difficulty level. Well, two things, but they're related, as the other is the player's massive hitbox, which is a major contributing factor to the game's high difficulty. At first, I was a little sceptical, since I easily managed to get past the first stage on my first attempt. It was only after several failed attempts to get past the second that I realised the veracity of all the complaints of those who came before me. I even looked up the level select cheat so I could take a few more varied screenshots for this review! (As an interesting bit of trivia, the level select cheat is performed by inputting the famous Konami code backwards on the titles screen. Inputting it the right way round just flashes up the message "I AM NOT KONANI", which is slightly amusing).

Other than the difficulty, though, this game is a joy to play: it's smooth, it's fast, everything works how it should, and it generally just feels good. Getting back to the graphics, it also looks amazing! A lot better in motion than in still screenshots,though. And the graphical gimmick I mentioned back in the first paragraph? It's the ground: unlike Space Harrier's abstract grids, the floor in Cosmic Epsilon shows actual places! There's roads, shorelines, cracked earth and lava flows, even a high-altitude stage where you're flying above a lightly cloudy sky. All of this is conveyed to you in the form of patterns of big, differently coloured squares, but nonetheless, it's an effect that works, and really gives the game a sense of place.

So I definitely recommend Cosmic Epsilon. It's one of the most impressive games on its host system, and it's actually fun to play in its own right too. 

Turbo Girl (MSX)

There might be something I've forgotten in the misty past of this blog, but I think this might be the first western-developed MSX game I've covered here. As well as being popular in Japan, the system also had/has a strong following in mainland Europe, especially the Netherlands. This game, however, is Spanish, and it's a port of a ZX Spectrum game, which you can probably tell just from looking at the screenshots, since it's pretty much a direct port, colour clash and all. (As an aside, I think this might also be the first Spanish game I've featured?)

The game's a shooting game with some platforming. Top down platforming. With multiple consecutive jumps that require pixel-perfect timing and precision. I'm going to spoil the rest of the review for you now: it's pretty much completely negative. This game is just no fun to play at all, nor does it have any other redeeming features, except maybe having a female protaagonist (though you can only really see her on the very eighties title screen).

It's ugly, it's slow, it's boring, and there's no music anywhere except the title screen. The stage design is horrible, too: as well as the pixel perfect death-jumps, there's also enemies that pop up from the bottom of the screen without warning, some really unpleasant checkpoint placing and a general cramped feeling to everything. On top of all this, despite the word "turbo" being right there in the title, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the derelict space stations on which the game is set were submerged in oceans of treacle, as everything moves incredibly slowly, even the bullets.

Another problem the game has is the controls: you can select joystick controls at the start, but the game only recognises one joystick button (presumably a vestigial problem from its Spectrum source), with jump assigned to the space bar. Remember those nigh-impossible jumps I described earlier? I was playing on an emulator, using joy2key to map the space bar to one of the buttons on my USB Saturn controller. If you were playing on real hardware, you wouldn't be able to sdo that, and the game would be rendered pretty much impossible. Especially since the second stage, as far as I can tell, does away with the shooting part of the game completely and becomes entirely about jumping across massive gaps in the floor.

Don't play Turbo Girl, it's an irredeemible, joyless piece of garbage.

Vindex (Amiga)

This was going to be a post about a game entitled "Space Harrier: Return to the Fantasy Zone", which is one of those semi-official western sequels to Japanese games I talked about in my review of Dragon's Revenge. It's an especially obscure one, too, since as far as I can tell, it was only released in a compilation along with the original Space Harrier as well as a couple of other arcade ports. Unfortunately, it only had the option to play using the mouse, which was so fiddly and useless as to render the game completely unplayable. And that's not just my personal dislike of mouse controls in action games, Harrier really did just seem to jerkily zip around the screen at random. So instead, here's Vindex, another sprite scaling shooting game on the Amiga.

Vindex at least has functioning controls, which puts it a step above SH:RttFZ. Unfortunately, that's about all it has. Well, that's not fair, some of the backgrounds look okay in a minimalist sort of way. Only the backgrounds, though: your ship and the enemies look very generic and bland, with the final boss looking particularly like a very unimaginative child's drawing of a robot.

As lackluster as the graphics are, at least they're there, which is more than can be said for the music. It might just be because I associate sprite scaling games with SEGA and Taito, two companies who always put great soundtracks in their games, but Vindex's lack of music is really weird and jarring, and makes the game feel incredibly empty.

It doesn't play well, either: all the hitboxes seem to be huge, and every time you lose a life, you go back to the start of the current stage. It's an exercise in tedium, and completely devoid of fun or excitement. I even resorted to using a level select cheat just to take a few more varied screenshots (which is also how I saw the rubbish-looking final boss, who is also incredibly easy to kill, probably easier than any other part of the game). It probably goes without saying at this point, but Vindex is a game I definitely don't recommend. It's so tedious, in fact, that I had to look at the earlier paragraphs in this document to remind myself of its name. I don't like writing such overwhelmingly negative reviews, but sometimes there's just nothing positive to be said about a game.

Death Wish 3 (C64)

In case you aren't aware, this isn't the third in a series of games entitled Death Wish, but is a licensed game based on the third in a series of movies by that name, in which Charles Bronson plays a kind of vengeful war diety named Paul Kersey. The third movie sees him descend upon a version of New York that looks more like Rossington, where he falls in love with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, then kill like a hundred people with a variety of guns and the assistance of other local pensioners.

Anyway, it's interesting because it's an incredibly early example of a popular 2010s genre: the open-world tidying game. That is, games in which you can freely roam about a huge map, and there are dots on the map representing things like bosses, minigames and so on that you're expected to tidy up. Obviously, the map isn't particularly big, and the dots only represent bosses (or rather, tactically significant enemies, since they're not any more difficult to kill than the regular enemies), but in principle it's the same. You play as Kersey, and you walk around New York, killing bad guys and avoiding the temptation to kill cops and old women (because doing so reduces your score significantly).

In the interests of simple, readable game design, there are actually only five kinds of people in Death Wish 3's portrayal of New York: cops, old women, criminals, large breasted women who occasionally stop to scratch their bums, and the mysterious guys who run in to clean all the corpses away. The last two types can't be killed, either. So you get points for killing criminals and lose them for killing old people and cops. There's also blinking dots on the map, usually inside buildings. These are the riot leaders, and you've got to get to them and kill them, which stops the current riot and gives you a couple of minutes of peace, quiet and boredom until the next one starts. You just do this until you either get killed by the criminals or you stop playing from boredom.

As already mentioned, it's an interesting concept to see in not only a game from over thirty years ago, but one that's also a throwaway movie license too. However, there's really only a few minutes of fun to be had, as once you've put down one riot, they don't get any harder or add new types of enemy or anything. Plus the way you navigate around the streets is really odd and took me a while to figure out: pressing up or down rotates your view by ninety degrees, and you really need to keep an eye on the map to be able to have a clue as to where you're going. I'd say give it a try, just for curiosity's sake, but don't expect to be glued to it, or to ever have the desire to return.

Brave Blade (Arcade)

I'll start by being honest here, and admit that the thing that drew me towards this game is the graphics. They're that amazing kind of 3D graphics that was prevalent among arcade fighting and racing games from the mid-90s up to about the turn of the century, but it's a rare example of a shooting game in that visual style. And it does it with flair, too, as Brave Blade is set in a great-looking medieval/world war I/giant robots world, with all kinds of cool stuff in it. The developers clearly knew what they were doing too, as the first stage is very short, and ends with a boss fight against a giant tank that transforms into a robot with an awesome animation, and that boss (and its transformation animation) appears prominently in the game's attract mode too.

So, the game itself? You pick one of five pilot/knights, each with different weaponry, and you shoot and slash your enemies, of course. You've got three buttons: shoot, which just shoots, slash/guard, which is your powerful melee attack when tapped and a guard when held, and your power up button, which activates your powered up mode, during which you're invincible and can only melee attack. Regulating all of this is a power bar at the bottom of the screen, which goes up when you destroy enemies (or certain kinds of enemy bullets and missiles that can be destroyed) and goes down when you guard. You can only activate your powered form when it's full, so I recommend never bothering to use the guard (though I'm sure there's probably expert players somewhere who'd tell you I'm incredibly wrong and stupid, I can't see the advantage of it).

The scoring system is centered around the collection of Battle Garegga-esque medals, which at the most basic level, work in the same way as Battle Garegga's: their value starts at 100 and gradually works its way into the tens and even hundreds of thousands, though if you let one drop off the bottom of the screen, it's back down to 100 points a pop. The twist Brave Blade adds is that you can accelerate the accumulation of value in medals by repeatedly attacking them with your melee weapon, which also makes them bounce up the screen a bit, giving you a little more time to collect them too. Of course, if you're doing this, that'll take your concentration away from fighting the enemies and dodging their attacks, so there's a lot of risk/reward play going on. Personally, I'm a bit cowardly, so I only juggle the medals while I'm powered up.

Brave Blade is an excellent game all round. It plays great, with a bunch of fun systems that all interlock together well, and it looks amazing too. I definitely recommend playing it. It's just a shame that it'll probably never get any kind of home port like some other, more well-known shooting games have been getting in recent years.

Space War Attack (PS2)

When I first started playing Space War Attack (also known as Simple 2000 Series Vol. 78: The Uchuu Taisensou), I had planned to liken it to a videogame version of an Asylum movie. But as I played it more, I realised how unfair that was: as much as I love The Asylum, the name conjures, in most people's minds, an image of incompetence and lack of imagination. Now I'd say that's unfair as a start, since The Asylum have made plenty of legitimately enjoyable movies and TV shows and it'd take a tedious snob to deny that. Actually, Space War Attack IS like an Asylum film in videogame form: it takes a simple concept and a low budget, and combines them with a shameless kind of creative enthusiasm to create something that's a ton of fun.

Anyway, it's a 3D action-oriented combat flight sim-type thing, in which you fly around, firing locked-on missiles at enemies and so on. The hook, though, is the enemies themselves: while most stages will have a squadron of enemy fighters getting in the way, which look a lot like organic fighter jets (kind of like the ones in Space Harrier II), your main target enemies are a bit more exciting. There's bigger fighter/bomber aliens, which look kind of like the Toho kaiju Battra, there's giant scorpions and snakes, meteors, enormous flying mechanical starfish, and so on. A lazier person would sum it up as being "Earth Defence Force in a fighter jet!", but though there's a lot of undeniable similarities, the atmosphere and feel is totally different, in some vague, hard to describe way.

I think special note should also be made of the settings for the stages. Though it does partake in the traditional Simple Series cost-saving trick of reusing maps at different times of the day, those few maps are really great-looking. In the stages I've played so far, I've seen, among others, a city in the middle of the desert, a series of super-futuristic solar/hydro power plant facilities in the ocean, and a bigger city that's built on a concentric series of artificial islands surrounding a huge volcano emerging from the sea. It's all very futuristic, and more importantly, with its gleaming cities, blue skies and apparent commitment to renewable energy, it is as the Overwatch slogan goes, a future worth saving.

In my review of Savage Skies, I compained that a common problem I've had playing this genre is that you often end up chasing a little arrow pointing to the nearest enemy off the edge of the screen. I don't know how the developers did it, but that's not something I've had much of a problem with in Space War Attack, and it's even better when you unlock long-range lock-on missiles a few stages in. It seems that the developers Bit-Town are responsible for a few other PS2 flight sims, and I may well seek them out at some point in the future, so high is this game's quality.

Space War Attack is a great game: a cool setting, and a ton of fun to play. The downside is that it's a good game from the Simple 2000 series that got a PAL release, which means that copies are hard to get hold of, and as such, there's currently none of them on Amazon, and the cheapest on Ebay is about £50. You might have better luck looking for the Japanese version, though.

Heated Barrel (Arcade)

Heated Barrel is a pretty unfortunate case, as it marks the first time (as far as I can remember) that a game excels in almost all respects, but I can't really recommend it for one particular reason that represents a stupid and unfortunate set of decisions on the part of the developers.

It's a wild west-themed horizontally-scrolling shooting game, presented in a belt scrolly fashion that works really well. You play as a generic cowboy, and you go from right to left shooting crowds of various kinds of bad guys, as well as the occasional bear, bull, ghost or demon. It's very fast and smooth, and feels great to control and play in general. To an extent, it looks great, too. All the sprites are detailed, well animated, and full of personality.

There's not many power-ups or gimmicks to speak of, but the aforementioned smooth speed more than makes up for the lack of mechanical complexity. Repetition isn't really a problem, either, as each stage introduces a whole bunch of new foes to gun down, alongside the ever-present generic enemies. All in all, Heated Barrel is pretty close to being an excellent game, and I wish I was introducing you all to a forgotten, hidden arcade gem. But it's time to get onto that downer I've been alluding to.

The fact is, this game is super racist. From the first stage, a lot of the enemies are racist caricatures: Native American "savages", running around near-naked, throwing stone axes and so on, lazy, corpulent, hairy Mexican bandits with gatling guns and sombreros, and the midboss you fight in the middle of the third stage is a huge, grotesquely muscled black prisoner with a ball and chain and a face that looks like it was drawn by infamous neo-nazi cartoonist A. Wyatt Mann. The style of all the graphics shows that they were clearly trying to emulate the look of classic American animated shorts, the difference being that those shorts are from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, whereas this game was made in 1992. It sucks, but as good as this game is, I don't think that cancels out how awful it is thematically.

Ichigeku Sachuu!! Hoihoi-san (PS2)

In the year 20XX, the face of pest control is small robots with live weapons, just like in the 2000AD series Banzai Battalion, though unlike Banzai Battalion, this is a Japanese videogame from 2003, so the robot in question is a tiny maid. Anyway, I think the plot is that you're some guy who's bought one of these robots and set up a small business for himself hiring it out to kill the insects in his neighbours' houses, since Japan is a warm, humid country and therefore, full of huge insects with no respect for human privacy.

It's nota very good business model, though, since the fees he collects for this task barely cover the cost of ammunition for Hoihoi's guns. You will be able to afford the best melee weapon after only a few stages, and that coupled with a mastery of sneaking up on the bugs that like to run away, will save you a lot of bullets, and therefore money.

I haven't really explained the game at all yet, have I? It's a 3D third person shooter, that's very much from a bygone age. We've all complained about how a lot of modern 3D games feel very similar, due to them all using near-identical control schemes where the left analogue stick moves your character, and the right moves the camera around them. Hoihoi-san is from the days when a lot of developers hadn't really figured this out yet, so while the left analogue stick does move Hoihoi around, the right stick does nothing at all, the player's only control of the camera being the L1 button putting it directly behind Hoihoi. If you're wondering about aiming your guns, well that's all automatic: if you're near an enemy, a red crosshair will appear on it, and you can shoot them.

The incredibly dated controls aside, this is a pretty good game! It's nothing special, but it looks alright, it's cute, and smashing bugs is very satisfying. Another thing to note about the bugs is that having them be normal-sized and shrinking the player down to their level is far creepier than the typical videogame approach of having normal-sized protagonists and giant bugs. And though all the characters and the stages are cartoony, the bugs are fairly realistic-looking, making them even creepier. The stages are obviously all rooms in people's houses: living rooms, basements, kitchens, etc. You can tell that you're in a different person's house on different stages, though, as different people have different sets of belongings and tastes in decor, which is another nice little touch.

Though it isn't a bad game, I can't really recommend playing Ichigeku Sachii!! Hoihoi-san. Like I've said, it's incredibly dated, and it's also pretty frustrating at first, until you get used to all its little idiosyncracies, and there just isn't anything about it that's interesting or exciting enough to get past its faults.

Mabougirl Miracle Kurun (PC)

If you're smart enough to spot bi-ingual puns, you may have already guessed this game's main hook, which is one I'm suprised to have never encountered before: it's a combination of the old Irritating Stick/Kuru Kuru Kururin thing where you have to navigate a rotating stick through a maze without touching the sides and a danmaku-style shooting game. The pun of course being that the "cle" from "miracle" becomes "kuru" when transliterated into Japanese, and "kuru kuru" is a Japanese onomatopoeia for rotation.

Anyway, you play as a stick that you can move around, and also rotate either way at will, and you have to get through the stages without touching anything (obviously, unlike most modern shooting games, your hitbox is the same size as your ship, since that's the entire point of the game). All the while, bullets will be streaming from the wide sides of your stick, so you've got to juggle the rotation you do to avoid collisions and the rotation you do to try and kill enemies. Killing enemies also fills a meter, and at the press of a button, you can switch from your regular bullets to a powerful laser, that shoots out from the ends of your stick, and is not only more powerful than your normal shots, but also has a score multiplier attached to it that decreases as the meter depletes.

As you play through the stages, you collect gems to buy upgrades, like  increases to max HP, greater ranges of speed settings for both movement and rotation, and even alternative ships. Disappointingly, though, the alternate ships only have different weaponry to the default ship. I would have thought the game could present a whole new set of challenes if there were ships that were different shapes: shorter but fatter for example, or maybe even curved. For those worried about the purity of the arcade-style experience being affected by the upgrades, you can turn them off once unlocked. Furthermore, the game doesn't really have arcade-style progression. Instead, each stage is played individually with a new set of lives and a score that doesn't carry over into other stages. As an extra challenge, though, some upgrades can only be bought by spending a certain kind of gem that can only be obtained one at a time, and only by completing a stage without taking any damage at all.

Mabougirl Miracle Kurun is far from being my favourite game from the current Japanese indie scene, but it's even further from being the worst I've played, too. It's alright, I guess. It'd probably worth a buy if it ever gets released in some convenient form, but it's not worth using a proxy site to order a physical copy from Japan. Like I did. Doh.