I figure I might as well start writing my column about games no one ever played. I picked up the demo for Touhou Star Lotus Boat: Unidentified Fantastic Object. You can pick up the demo here http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WMRC4OAS. Shouldn't need anything fancy besides DirectX. Just click on what appears to be 'yes' and install it for the Japanese challenged.
Touhou is your vertical crazy shooter. You get to pick between 3 characters (Reimu, Marisa, and Sanae) who have two options which have nothing in common with each other. Hold shift to slow down (and changes your attack pattern generally to be more focused on shooting straight). Z to fire, and X to use bombs (if you got them). There are these UFO objects you can collect. You can get either 3 of the same color or 1 of every color and then a big UFO will shoot up. It will suck up all the powerups and after it has sucked enough up you get some item back depending on what type it is, and blowing it up gets you some powerup plus whatever it sucked up. The triple red gives you 1/3 of a lifebar for filling/blowing up. The triple blue gives you a lot of points depending on how much it sucked up. The green one gives you 1/3 of a bomb for blowing it up and 1 bomb for filling it up. The 1 of each kind gives you weapon powerups for filling it and 1 UFO piece for blowing it up.
The system is pretty interesting except that trying to get a UFO piece will usually lead you to your death. Generally speaking you want either bombs or weapon powerups but it's not always easy to pick them. Your weapon powers up VERY SLOWLY from colleting the P powerups, and you lose 1 full level of weapon power whenever you die.
Apparently the game maker has decided that everyone who plays this must know the series inside out so you don't get even basic stuff like a character's firepower, top speed, and slow speed rating anymore. That is to say you are supposed to know Reimu has a speed rating of 1 (which is awesome) and a firepower of 6 while Marisa has a speed rating of 6 (which means you'll randomly run into stuff and die horribly) and a firepower of 1, and Sanae is probably around middle for both.
Now, you might get the feeling that Marisa utterly sucks to play as, and she does. But it's sort of like how in a Megaman game you never play as Megaman X first if you could play as Zero, Marisa is like the Zero of this series. She's simply way too cool even though there is no gameplay merit to play her whatsoever. Well this game seems to make sure it will be very painful to play the coolest human character in the world of Touhou. At least Marisa got her mega laser bomb back, except both of Reimu's bombs still do more damage anyway.
Actually this game is pretty painful to play no matter what. Even the usual godlike Reimu(Homing) seems to get hit pretty hard on some of the bosses, like level 2's Kogasa who shoots these homing umbrellas that you can't destroy on time with her firepower. Incidentally she is the only boss out of the three that seems remotely interesting but after dying a few times you'll probably just throw a bomb in her face when she goes to her last life bar instead of trying to actually figure out how to avoid that mess.
One of the neat things about Touhou is the game is very well color-coded in the attack pattern and, at least for the first 3 games (TH6-8) you can basically tell who is powerful by what colors they have. Purple and Red magic definitely rules the day in the world of Touhou, championed by Yukari (whose name literally means Purple) and Remilia Scarlet, respectively. I realize it's hard to make a shooter without red bullets, but purple bullets always meant you're messing with someone you're never supposed to mess with in the world of Touhou. Prior to TH12, once you eliminate any of the girls who have rainbow powers (e.g. not good or bad at any particular color), you're left with the Aspect of Dimension, Death, and Heaven as the only ones who can use purple bullets. Only Reimu, the Aspect of Heaven, can use red and purple at the same time to their full power, and when you fight her it literally says she is completely unbeatable but she will let you win because an unbeatable game is dumb.
Well in TH12 you'll go to stage 1 and realize the first boss alternates between red and purple shots... so does the second... and I think so does the third (hard to tell, her color scheme is weird). While the color scheme has been relaxed somewhat in the recent games, this is like just stomping on the earlier game's graves. It's like the series is taking anything that was ever clever in the earlier incarnation and try to make it worse. It used to be there had to be a good reason to even get another girl with rainbow powers and now people can just mix the two spectrums of the rainbow with no repercussions.
Also, there is no option to start with more than 3 lives. If you die, you have unlimited continues but you must start at the begininng of the stage, which means you're quite likely to find yourself in a situation where you can never beat a stage. Again all the earlier games give you the option to take extra lives at a scoring penalty, and while you only have 3 continues you pick up where you died. The earlier games are plenty hard in their own but when you're armed with 15 lives and 60 bombs as Sakuya Izayoi, maybe you can actually beat the game. At least that's far more likely than beating any of the recent ones with only 3 lives and 6 bombs max.
The maker of this series, ZUN, is referred to as "God Master" by fans. I realized that in Japanese this actually means "Temple Keeper" but generally speaking I think you're on some kind of power trip if you want people to refer to you with the word "God" in the title. The evolution of this series sounds like what Itagaki does with Ninja Gaiden. You start with a good game and then try to make it 10 times harder and strip out anything that ever helped the player, and you get the recent Touhou games. There is still no boss attack mode ever since TH8 because you might actualy get better at this game if it didn't take you 30 minutes to get to the last boss with 1 life left and then promptly die so you can start over again.
Touhou is your vertical crazy shooter. You get to pick between 3 characters (Reimu, Marisa, and Sanae) who have two options which have nothing in common with each other. Hold shift to slow down (and changes your attack pattern generally to be more focused on shooting straight). Z to fire, and X to use bombs (if you got them). There are these UFO objects you can collect. You can get either 3 of the same color or 1 of every color and then a big UFO will shoot up. It will suck up all the powerups and after it has sucked enough up you get some item back depending on what type it is, and blowing it up gets you some powerup plus whatever it sucked up. The triple red gives you 1/3 of a lifebar for filling/blowing up. The triple blue gives you a lot of points depending on how much it sucked up. The green one gives you 1/3 of a bomb for blowing it up and 1 bomb for filling it up. The 1 of each kind gives you weapon powerups for filling it and 1 UFO piece for blowing it up.
The system is pretty interesting except that trying to get a UFO piece will usually lead you to your death. Generally speaking you want either bombs or weapon powerups but it's not always easy to pick them. Your weapon powers up VERY SLOWLY from colleting the P powerups, and you lose 1 full level of weapon power whenever you die.
Apparently the game maker has decided that everyone who plays this must know the series inside out so you don't get even basic stuff like a character's firepower, top speed, and slow speed rating anymore. That is to say you are supposed to know Reimu has a speed rating of 1 (which is awesome) and a firepower of 6 while Marisa has a speed rating of 6 (which means you'll randomly run into stuff and die horribly) and a firepower of 1, and Sanae is probably around middle for both.
Now, you might get the feeling that Marisa utterly sucks to play as, and she does. But it's sort of like how in a Megaman game you never play as Megaman X first if you could play as Zero, Marisa is like the Zero of this series. She's simply way too cool even though there is no gameplay merit to play her whatsoever. Well this game seems to make sure it will be very painful to play the coolest human character in the world of Touhou. At least Marisa got her mega laser bomb back, except both of Reimu's bombs still do more damage anyway.
Actually this game is pretty painful to play no matter what. Even the usual godlike Reimu(Homing) seems to get hit pretty hard on some of the bosses, like level 2's Kogasa who shoots these homing umbrellas that you can't destroy on time with her firepower. Incidentally she is the only boss out of the three that seems remotely interesting but after dying a few times you'll probably just throw a bomb in her face when she goes to her last life bar instead of trying to actually figure out how to avoid that mess.
One of the neat things about Touhou is the game is very well color-coded in the attack pattern and, at least for the first 3 games (TH6-8) you can basically tell who is powerful by what colors they have. Purple and Red magic definitely rules the day in the world of Touhou, championed by Yukari (whose name literally means Purple) and Remilia Scarlet, respectively. I realize it's hard to make a shooter without red bullets, but purple bullets always meant you're messing with someone you're never supposed to mess with in the world of Touhou. Prior to TH12, once you eliminate any of the girls who have rainbow powers (e.g. not good or bad at any particular color), you're left with the Aspect of Dimension, Death, and Heaven as the only ones who can use purple bullets. Only Reimu, the Aspect of Heaven, can use red and purple at the same time to their full power, and when you fight her it literally says she is completely unbeatable but she will let you win because an unbeatable game is dumb.
Well in TH12 you'll go to stage 1 and realize the first boss alternates between red and purple shots... so does the second... and I think so does the third (hard to tell, her color scheme is weird). While the color scheme has been relaxed somewhat in the recent games, this is like just stomping on the earlier game's graves. It's like the series is taking anything that was ever clever in the earlier incarnation and try to make it worse. It used to be there had to be a good reason to even get another girl with rainbow powers and now people can just mix the two spectrums of the rainbow with no repercussions.
Also, there is no option to start with more than 3 lives. If you die, you have unlimited continues but you must start at the begininng of the stage, which means you're quite likely to find yourself in a situation where you can never beat a stage. Again all the earlier games give you the option to take extra lives at a scoring penalty, and while you only have 3 continues you pick up where you died. The earlier games are plenty hard in their own but when you're armed with 15 lives and 60 bombs as Sakuya Izayoi, maybe you can actually beat the game. At least that's far more likely than beating any of the recent ones with only 3 lives and 6 bombs max.
The maker of this series, ZUN, is referred to as "God Master" by fans. I realized that in Japanese this actually means "Temple Keeper" but generally speaking I think you're on some kind of power trip if you want people to refer to you with the word "God" in the title. The evolution of this series sounds like what Itagaki does with Ninja Gaiden. You start with a good game and then try to make it 10 times harder and strip out anything that ever helped the player, and you get the recent Touhou games. There is still no boss attack mode ever since TH8 because you might actualy get better at this game if it didn't take you 30 minutes to get to the last boss with 1 life left and then promptly die so you can start over again.
