Much in the way Mercs is a great game that makes me curse the name of tanks, Darius Twin is a mostly good beginner shmup that kneels at the mercy of Radiator, the hermit crab out to kick ass and take names. This asshole has 1,000,000,000 hit points, no animation pre-empting his attack, and shoots you with a giant 5-way radial spread of enormous hoop-like bullets. Are the bullet speeds generous enough to let you dodge out of the way? Nope. Is there a pattern to the angle the shots are fired at? Nope. Are all 5 shots uniformly aligned with each other? Nope nope nope. And the final stage has you fight THREE of them while suffering through an impenetrable wave of random minibosses.

I like the rest of the game a fair bit, especially for the music and parallax backgrounds, but damn what a way to ruin an otherwise fine game.

Meant to replay Axelay tonight alongside D-Force, but l slept a lot and then started thinking about this game instead, which also needed a replay. Competing with the other 1991 shmups on SNES, it just might win. Gradius III is the only other one coming close from what I remember (though I guess technically that SNES port is a 1990 game, but it was still competing in the launch window in all regions whenever said time arrived).

This was kind of a weird introduction to the Darius series for me years ago, but a welcome one nonetheless. It's not on par with Darius Gaiden nor the Genesis port of Darius II, but it still plays very nicely and is even a bit more generous, notably allowing you to keep all your powerups upon dying. This would allow for an easier 1cc in theory, but the game is still quite tough towards the end so I wouldn't hold my breath.

I've really grown to appreciate how pretty this game looks as well. Darius in general has a very unique aesthetic compared to its contemporaries in the shmup genre, and Twin is perhaps the first to lean this far into it. I especially love the ocean backgrounds in levels A and H. On the other hand, though, it does make me wish the alternate routes were more varied. Twin dials back the different paths a bit in comparison to Darius II, only featuring one final level for example. I can't say for sure, but limitations at the time would be my guess. In the console's debut everyone was pretty much still finding their footing - Final Fight's port is heavily compromised, Gradius III is plagued by slowdown, and D-Force is shrouded in pure ineptitude and awful performance even on an 8 megabit cartridge.

Whatever the case, even without as many ways to replay it as Darius II or Gaiden, Darius Twin is thoroughly solid and seemingly very impressive for the console's infancy. I don't think I noticed any slowdown while playing, the big bad slowdown plaguing the SNES shmup library for decades to come, etc. If it's even there in this game, it's too subtle to really affect gameplay, much unlike peers at the time such as Super R-Type, Gradius III & D-Force. It's nothing too crazy for the Darius series' later standards, but for its release date and circumstances I've learned to appreciate it quite a bit more than I previously had. Certainly a much stronger effort than Darius Force, at a minimum.