Posted

Nov 7th 2006

Mood

Happy

Music

exboss_2.ogg (Samidare Rain)

I recently discovered a pretty freakin' cool website when browsing /v/ one day. No, this isn't some promotion to get me... stuff, but it's a genuine sharing of something I found very enjoyable.
Simulation Style (It's a link, click it) is a site that hosts various doujin games, (...I guess it's like the equivalent of homebrew or something? I forgot the exact meaning) including the entire Tohou (If you've ever seen it in action, it's a vertical shoot 'em up where you play as little witch girls...) series and thier various spin offs.
A lot of the games there are really, really nice... you have to register to download anything, but it's just like registering to a forum, and you don't have to do anything else after that but download. Here's a list of my favorite games on the site --

Megamari - A clone of Megaman 2 set in the Tohou universe. You play as Marissa, who is apparently the main character of the entire series, and her partner Alice. It combines the general awesomeness of Megaman 2 with the general awesomeness of Shmup style enemy projectiles... meaning the enemies shoot lots and LOTS of bullets at you. Needless to say, the difficulty of this game is a touch high, and you shouldn't even consider it if you don't have some manner of game pad.

Super Marissa Land - Another clone game set in the Touhou universe. I'll give you a guess as to what it's a clone of.
...It's a Super Mario Land clone, in case you didn't catch the heavy hint in the title. It's got nice music, but some of the mechanics (such as the way Marissa runs...) are slightly off. Gaining speed takes a little distance, so you'll have to keep that in mind when making jumps. It's not the best of the games, but it's amusing.

AirRade -AIR- - This game is absolutely amazing. It's like Parodius, but maybe a million times cuter. There's this neat combo system too, and... well, the game is just obscenely adorable. The menus are in English, but everything else is in moonspeak if you particularly care about the story. This game's a pretty big download (>200 MB) so be wary of that. I love, love LOVE this game.

Samidare Rain - This one was my favorite until I played AirRade. One thing that surprised me was that this was a doujin vertical shooter, but it didn't involve little girls at all. You play as a generic ship shooting other generic ships and sometimes there's a giant robot or something. The bullet patterns are really pretty, the music is really pretty, the menus are really pretty, and the game is just generally fun for the average masochistic Shmup player. This game also differs from most vertical Shmups by apparently not having a bomb system (There's a layer of moonspeak entirely too thick for me to penetrate to find any info to the contrary) -- this is replaced by a special sheild system. There's a sheild button you can press to activate your sheild, which runs out after quite a short amount of time. The bullets that hit the shield make your shots much more powerful for a short amount of time, and you get bonus points for destroying enemies with this sort of attack. This game carries around half the filesize of AirRade if I remember correctly (>100MB), so it'll be a quicker download, at least. If you're into Shmups, try this game.

I haven't played all the games here, but I might. *goes on to play more AirRade)
(Yes, AirRade is spelled wrong. Don't ask me, that's just how they spell it in the game.)