WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA this game is punishing as all hell dear lord. I feel like "Long" is the best way to describe this game in one word. This game's main claim to fame gimmick is the fact that it has a 3-monitor wide super long display that everything is played on. The horizontal space for movement here is nuts and, for better or for worse, they utilize all of the extra screen space to its utmost extent. Due to how long it is, enemies can come in zooming from both sides and there's a reasonable amount of time to react to everything, and it makes this game absolutely a game of positioning. If you aren't in the right places to defeat the enemies efficiently, eventually the long display will fill up with bullets and enemies from every direction and combined with the lack of any speed powerups whatsoever if you get into those situations there's no hope. The game is also really punishing as you need 8 powerups EACH to upgrade your weapon, bombs, and shield. Dying once takes all of them away so it's also one of those "if you die at any point you might as well just give up" shmups. The level progression is outrun-style where there are branching paths at the end of each level to choose what level to tackle next, and each level has their own amounts of powerups for each type so you really gotta plan a course around your playstyle if you want to succeed. Also since you need so many power ups to upgrade and there's a limited amount of each in the levels you BEST REMEMBER WHERE THEY SPAWN, once again enforcing good memorization and positioning.

Despite all my qualms about the difficulty I do find the game quite aesthetically cool. The bosses are all fish and due to the large resolution of the game all the sprites look super cool. Zuntata is behind the music so that gaurantees a quality soundtrack as well. Despite the huge difficulty making my playthrough of this quite painful even WITH things like checkpoint save states, I can't say in entirely that I don't like this game. If I saw it in an arcade, I'd surely drop a credit in.

The biggest impression Darius makes is it's presentation—super wide, projected from three CRTs side by side in the original cabinet. The levels look good, even though it's repetitive, the enemies and your ship look cool—but the boss enemies are the coolest, massive robotic fish that I have to imagine would take up most of a crt screen themselves.

The sense of choice and progression—both in your ship upgrades and in selecting each level—is decidedly utilitarian, but just enticing enough to make me want to replay, if only so I can see what bosses are behind door number two.