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Mini-shump mini-review madness! To kick off the launch of Strafing Run, I will review for you, not just one game, but seven games! The catch is that they are all very small or simple. But make no mistake, the beauty of many classic shmups is not a lot of variety or a detailed story, and many of these mini-shmups deliver in the all-important areas of nail-biting gameplay and large, dramatic explosions. Not to mention there are some prime examples of minimalist design here. Several of these games are regular rotations in my desktop play, so I recommend going out there and picking a few of them up. Every one of these games is 100% free, so you'd be crazy not to try them. Every Extend - OMEGA Every Extend isn't really a shooter, but seems so much like a vertically scrolling shmup, I think it fully deserves to sit among these other titles. Although you are beset on all sides by your foes, and lose a life by being shot or rammed, your way of fighting back is very different here. In Every Extend, pressing the attack button causes your "ship" to explode, inviting a similar reaction from any of the nearby swarms of cubes that continually harass you. This, of course, costs you a life. That's right: it's a game about suicide bombing! But in our much more polygonal and detached world, we are merely trying to blow up as many cubes as possible in one go, by chaining the successive explosions together so that our poor ship-bomb's life is not wasted, and of course because we all know that combos always bring points. The powerups in the game are also a bit odd. Aside from a block that gives you more points and one that gives you more time, there is a red block that increases the enemy spawn rate. Although this is normally nonsensical in a shmup, here the larger number of enemies are needed in order to set up chains big enough to hit higher scores. Enough points will secure more lives so that our suicide ship may continue it's quest to blow up more cubes. With enough luck, he will make it to a boss that must be killed by chaining your attacks into it. The graphics in the game are abstract (as they are in all the games in this review) with a TRON-esque feel of being inside a computer. Everything is flat shaded, and aside from the final bosses and your little ship, composed entirely of cubes. The colors are fairly minimal, but it fits well with the whole look and feel of the game, and helps in identifying things in the thick of the action. I have to admit that the first time I played Every Extend, my love of the game quickly turned to rage. This game is balls-to-the-wall hard. You have to have a timing and precision beyond most mortal men if you ever hope to get a high score or even beat the hard mode of the game. That being said, this is one game where skill is its own reward. As hard as it is, the game is never cheap (although it may seem like it, especially since there is minimal invulnerability period when you respawn), and a well-timed combo can simultaneously blow up the whole screen and make you feel like the king of blowing stuff up.
Warning Forever - Hikoza'n-CHI X Warning Forever is a game centered solely around one thing: bosses. There are no levels in the game other than bosses themselves, and you spend the whole game skipping from boss to ever-bigger boss. These bosses all have a core with various "limbs" attached to it, each armed with all sorts of weapons of destruction. The game starts with some moderate-sized bosses, but they rapidly grow to epic proportions. Destroying the core will take out the boss, but first you have to dig your way past all the outgrowths, and you may want to take as many weapons as possible with you as you do it. The game is of the "beat the clock" variety, and there is a timer constantly running down in the background, so the emphasis is on finding the most efficient way to dispatch each boss. Dying does not cost you any ships, but it does cut a chunk out of your time every time you get whacked. This can lead to some real nail biting moments, as you try to wipe out the boss while the clock ticks down towards zero. Fortunately, your alternate shot can be aimed by moving your ship, so even if the boss gets behind you, you can still finish him off with time to spare. The graphics in this game are pure 2d, although they go for the retro vector look that most of the other games covered here seem to aim for. Some of the enemy beams and missiles have really excellent lighting effects, and although the explosions are pure 2d, they are chunky and satisfying. The game is a decent challenge, and it seems there's always something more to come take you on as you clear out more and more bosses. I love the challenge, and I am a big fan of the ridiculously over-the top bosses taking up the whole screen and filling it with deadly particle effects. It's a simple game, but it is always somewhere in my rotation of alien-shooting pastimes.
Noiz2sa - ABA Games Noiz2sa is a nice little shmup that takes the wireframe motif you will see so much more of in these reviews and paints it in calming pastel colors. Then it shoots at you until you die. It uses a feature you will see in almost all the other ABA games reviewed here, which is their special bullet-spread programming language called BulletML. This is an XML-based language that has allowed them to define some monstrous bullet attack patterns (you can use it to design your own, actually), so be prepared for some serious dodging. It also has a wide array of difficulty levels, so after you master the basics, you can keep coming back for more. In Noiz2sa, you will fly over a plain geometric cityscape constantly harassed by little squares. After you shoot the little squares, they will drop more little squares in groups of four that you pick up for a point bonus, so most of your time is spent balancing your square grabbing with dodging. Some of the enemies can be pounded on after their death to produce an enormous supply of these bonuses. If you can keep on one of these combos without dodging out of the way unnecessarily, you can rack up a few extra lives, and you'll need those lives, because the bosses (made of huge arrays of squares) will pelt you with all kinds of evil patterns. The game varies these intense moments with the more serene blasting of the regular levels so well that it almost feels like a relaxation shooter. With its pastel tones and trancey soundtrack, it almost qualifies as a "chill-out" shmup. (I apologize for the lack of screenshots. For some reason they all came out funny. I'll try to fix this at some point in the future) rRootage - ABA Games rRootage has a special place in my heart as the game that introduced me to ABA Games. It is like Warning Forever in that is is just a constant stream of boss battles, although the goal here is just to whittle away at the boss, rather than lopping off parts and shooting up some sort of core piece. The bosses attempt to stop your assault on their dignity through constant barrages of insane lead patterns, provided by ABA's own BulletML and Bulletsmorph barrage tools, and this by itself would make rRootage a wonderful entry into the "shooting at stuff" genre. The patterns are complex and insane, worthy of any Raizing or Psyiko classic. You can scale the difficulty by choosing one of the four levels from any tier, with the higher tiers gradually increasing the bullet speeds until only someone who is one with the force can dodge them. ABA could have rested on a challenging and excellently-crafted shooter, but they upped the ante by adding in additional game modes based on other popular shmups. In addition to a traditional mode where you have a stock of bombs with which to clear out the enemy's onslaught, they have 3 more modes: PSY mode steals the "shaving" concept from Psyvariar, which rewards you for scraping right up against (but not into) enemy shots by filling an invincibility gauge; IKA mode uses Ikaruga's two color technique, where you can change your ship between dark or light, and absorb enemy shots of the same color, instantly turning them into lasers that shoot up the boss; and GW mode (of which I'm not aware of the source) which builds up a reflective shield gauge over time. This means you can try the same bosses again with different play styles, and each one has been well executed. The graphics on the game are are in simple "vector-ey" style that ABA loves so much, but well done in a way that makes good use of DirectX's fancy lighting effects. I'm a big fan of the creative "beam" that your little ship emits. The boss explosions are a slightly weak popping apart of vector lines, but they work well with the theme. It helps for this sort of game that they made all the colors for the shots easily distinguishable. Overall, the combination of simple graphics and clever game play makes for one of the best pure shooter experiences I have had on the PC to date.
Parsec 47 - ABA Games Parsec47 may be a victim of ABA games' own success. Although it is a reasonable game in its own right, it just doesn't have the well maintained gimmicks of their other titles and lacks the zing of their snappy design. Partially, it is just lost in the sea of identical techniques that ABA seems to be using these games to perfect. Not only do you once again have the complex BulletML attack patterns, but it also retains the same wireframe "greenscreen" vector look and pulsing techno soundtrack that they use in their other games. Other than that, it's a great little lead-filled shooter, but it just feels like it has less to offer than their other products. The gimmick is a slowdown button (common in Japanese shmups) that also charges up a super blast, but it doesn't feel unique or special, and the "point box" collection is exactly the same as it is in Noiz2sa. Most gamers will want to pass on this and head for rRootage or Hikoza'n-chi's Warning Forever.
TUKUMI Fighters - ABA Games Tukumi Fighters is the only side-scrolling game in this batch. Like all the other ABA games, it uses simple graphics and their BulletML shot-patterns, but this time they went for a more unique and complete game. The theme they used is a play blockland, even down to the warning sign before each boss that a "huge toy" is approaching. Truly a menacing and frightful environment. The palette is a selection of low-key pastels, and it fits well with the theme. No question that the presentation here is perfect. The game experiments a seemingly great concept: as you shoot apart your enemies, you can grab the blocks that make them up and add them to your conglomeration of parts. These absorbed bits can take one hit each, and so they form a shield around your little block plane. They also provide additional firepower by firing out their own special shot patterns, increasing your offensive capabilities as well. So for the few moments for the game where you have made yourself into a huge blob of blocks with Easter-iffic firepower showering the screen, the game can be pretty satisfying. So why does Tukumi Fighters fail in the face of all this? Because it's just impossible to keep track of everything. The colors are too muted to distinguish the many vehicles and shots well with your peripheral vision, and the block like shapes of everything in the game certainly don't help, but what fails the most is the whole block-grabbing system. Most of the more useful enemy parts that come from bosses are too big to fit between the complicated enemy boss shot patterns (and the bosses don't go down with the one hit you will get off before this happens), so you lose them almost as soon as you get them. It can also be hard to tell where your plane is in the little pile of blocks that surround it, and it is often only found because it just got hit by a stray shot. You can almost do better on your own without powerups. In the end, Tukumi Fighters is just a little too experimental and clever for its own good, and the playability suffers.
Torus Trooper - ABA Games The last entry into this group review is a very unique game. Unlike the other games here, it is actually somewhat 3d. You control a ship that travels along a tube (hence the name) although the controls work like a top-down scrolling shooter, much like N2O, or even Gyruss, for those who can remember it. The graphics are very simple 3d wireframe fare, with polygons that would have looked at home on the 80s vector games, even down to the silly vector explosions. So why is this game a blast to play? (Nyuk, nyuk, shmup pun!) The sheer speed and exhilaration of this game cannot be matched, and the excellent soundtrack really helps. The game does not just have you moving slowly through the tube, but rushes you through it at insane speeds as it splits and twists (at hard or extreme level anyway, the game just isn't worth playing on "normal"). Due to the perspective and speed, it is very easy to develop tunnel-vision (again with the puns!) and focus only on the objects ahead. As a matter of a fact, much of your dodging in the game seems to be on pure instinct and luck, as the red colored flak seems to come from everywhere, filling the screen, and the world flies by at a million miles an hour. The sheer terror of it really makes the game a visceral experience, where you focus on just staying alive long enough to rack up the next few points. Dying too much or not killing enough will result in your timer inevitably dropping to zero, and the end of the game. Behind all this is some wonderful, cheesy dance music pounding away. I rarely notice music in games, but here it really adds to the adrenaline-rush feel of the game. The game ends up feeling like a retro 80s vector experience, but with a speed and intensity that few games can pull off.
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