Impossible Spell Card is out. Initial impressions:
-None of the spellcards are actually impossible. Ripoff! But no, seriously, this makes it a lot more fun than if it required bombs for every stage, and is where the puzzle-shooting gameplay comes in, as you work out the correct approach to each stage to clear without bombing.
-The game tracks completion stats for each stage (and remember, this one’s about bite-sized stages, and there are a lot of them), including how many attempts you’ve made, how many times you’ve cleared, which bomb types you’ve used, and whether or not you’ve cleared without bombing.
-You start with three bomb types, and unlock more as you progress through the game. Your bombs also level up as you progress, based on how many stages you’ve cleared with them as your main bomb (which does not require you to actually use them). Clearing a stage without bombing counts as a clear for every bomb type you have unlocked, which is nice until you realize you’re still going to have to repeat the earlier stages if you want to get credit for the new bombs you’ve unlocked.
-Achievements! Hopefully this is a sign that this is the first Touhou game ZUN is going to try to bring to the west.
Yeah, no kidding. I was prepared to pay $15 on release, but I’ll take the lower price.
If the plan weren’t to play it for our shmup competition (because at this point, it’d be the best game for it), I’d offer a copy of Crimzon Clover as a prize.
Crimzon Clover was originally a doujin game released a few years back. Along with being rather well-designed and full of content, it had a level of polish on par with professional releases, and stood out among doujin shooters for this reason. It later got a remake for the NESiCA arcade platform; this version is even more polished, offers new game modes, and is generally awesome, but there’s no way for those of us in the west to play it at all, short of flying to Japan; worse, the original doujin release has been out of print for a while, and sellers finally ran out of copies some months back. Now, with the PC port of the arcade remake coming out and being a Steam release (and apparently being quite cheap!), all our problems are solved.
I’m hoping it becomes a really good gateway to shmups. It has good polish and appeal, more street cred than something like Jamestown, and it will be available on Steam. There should be at least one game mode that is easy to play.
A developer or publisher on Steam said this would be 1280x720. I was kind of afraid of that. Still a little small on my 1920x1200 monitor at 1:1 resolution, and it won’t fit in tate mode. Oh well, it’s better than 720x480.
Astebreed is out on Steam later. Vert/hori hybrid from Edelweiss, the Ether Vapor devs. Will most likely be $20 like the Playism release, which is puzzling when Crimzon Clover is only going to be $10.
Astebreed looks pretty cool. I just saw it on YouTube. I had written it off without even watching a video. Melee and charge attacks sound fun for a quick casual playthrough. But I’m in no rush to buy it with so much else going on right now.
It’s out, and…they broke the pricing. $5.59 for the deluxe edition, which includes the soundtrack. They’ll probably fix it shortly, but I went ahead and bought two copies.
Perfect! Novice seems to have the same easy patterns as Simple, but you still get to enter break mode. It looks very nice and vibrant. $7 is a joke for this.
I really think this will be a great gateway shoot 'em up, and now I want to prove it. I’ll buy up to 3 copies for anyone curious who wasn’t already planning to get it. (You know who you are.) You have to promise to post your impressions and play enough to get on the leaderboards.
Post here to ask nicely.
Other comments: I see they didn’t update all the assets, though the pixels are kind of charming. And I’m not sure they implemented friends’ leaderboards?
I’ll take you up on that. Thanks! My history with the genre is pretty marginal. I enjoyed Jamestown and a few of Cave’s tablet games, and have dabbled in a few others that showed up in bundles here and there (eXceed collection, Gundemonium Collection, Razor2). This sounded interesting, but I was planning to wait and make another attempt at some of the others in my backlog first.
I’m about to go on a week’s vacation and probably won’t have a chance to play until I get back, though.
Initial impressions, though I’ve only tried Time Attack so far:
+IT’S THE ARCADE REMAKE OF CRIMZON CLOVER, NOW ON PC.
+IT’S CRIMZON CLOVER, MADE READILY AVAILABLE FOR A WESTERN AUDIENCE.
+It supports my arcade stick with no hassles! Doujin games (including the original version of Crimzon Clover) are typically terrible about POV hats, and since the stick part of my fightstick acts as a D-pad (and therefore gets picked up as a POV hat), I normally have to use Joy2Key or XPadder to get things working; however, CCWI detected my stick with no problems whatsoever, and plays great with it.
-No more shop. It was a great metagame component for people who need that sort of thing, but now you only get achievements and medals.
-The aspect ratio kind of sucks, but it’s not a big deal. Not having lower resolution options is a bigger problem, since it means windowed mode is useless on my laptop, and other people are even reporting issues with fullscreen not working for the same reason.
-Though I didn’t have any issues, other people are reporting controller problems. :(
I’m officially putting Time Attack forward as our Qt3 CCWI tournament mode. I feel confident in this even without having played the other modes; caravan modes are tournament-friendly by nature, and this one gives infinite lives, so less skilled players can still see the full thing. I’m hearing amazing things about Boost mode, but I haven’t tried it yet.
I still love Novice Mode. Made it to EX BOSS 2 on my first try. I don’t seem to bank as many 1UPs as before, so I couldn’t burn through him with lots of lives.
I’ll go try the other modes.
My joystick didn’t work out of the box (it seems to emulate the X360 controller) but I’d rather play than mess with it. I still have my old profiler setup.
Damn this game needs friend leaderboards. I’ll stop now.
The Type-III ship feels super weird. Novice Boost is kind of pointless. Time Attack seems cool but I should try it more than once. I couldn’t even beat the final boss. This will be a good mode to play without my auto-shot setting in the profiler, which of course ruins some of my lock-ons. My hands are too stiff for an arcade stick after so much Dark Souls 2. But 3 minutes at a time should be fine.
Oh and Thraeg, I saw your post. Unless you want to play before you leave, PM me when you get back. I don’t want it to just sit in your Steam backlog for a week. :)
