I love Genesis, but if there's one thing I hate about its library, it's how over-produced and under-designed these can be, and every time I replay Hard Corps I'm convinced it's the epitome of this. Meet an awesome boss, kill it in 15 seconds before it does anything, move to the next one. Rinse and repeat for 6 stages. All these crazy moments and spectacles that obviously took a ton of work to implement, and they play themselves out with barely any input on your behalf. Barely any running or gunning. This is actually also an issue with Contra 3, and it's arguably worse there, but it feels so much louder and overt here because of the difference in scope.

Playing the JP version with health is by F A R the easiest Contra game, not even close. And why health in the game named 'Hard Corps', the cooler, edgier one obviously intended to be a pro-player gauntlet? It's obvious it was a last-moment inclusion when the devteam realized all your deaths were due to memorization-based pitfalls, and they chalked up they'd rather let players see all the cool shit than have them burn 10 hours into the same scripted sections just to see a burping alien foot or the pelican version of Mighty Orbots.

Idk, cool game, rad game, still fun just for merit what's here, I'm gonna come back to it like 6 months from now and notice something new in the backgrounds, but the gameplay is so so so so so not there and I can't help but pine for a version where these bosses kick and scream and go rabid like actual bloated alien menaces should.

Jenny asked me to play this a fair while after i watched her play it. It's cool, you fight the Toohoos by absorbing their bullets, converting them to blocks on a separate grid, then clicking them away. They're constantly introducing new rules building on the groundwork, either changing how the boss interacts with your attacks, throwing special disruptor blocks, making you intentionally take damage, etc. You have to manage two interfaces at once + two vectors of control, it's some really creatively-orchestrated stuff. I also admire that even though this isn't a shmup, your shmup movement fundamentals apply to bullet-weaving and shot-collecting here too. I'm admittedly put a little off by the artist (why's everyone a cannibal with giant love handles?) but I respect the hustle. More solo devs ought to make self-indulgent stuff like this.

I would like this more if it had a little less fat to chew and anything resembling a soundtrack - like, I'm not even a Touhou fan, but isn't half the appeal of this series the classical/rock fusion music? What's with the babies'-first-tonka-truck-greg-heffley-stepping-forward-famitracker-ass sludge here?

It's fantastic but too hard and mostly for things that require insane routing of not just level layouts, but unpredictable physics-based environmental hazards - which is still 100% more learnable than the average gradius game because you RESPAWN WITH OPTIONS INTACT but still makes this a mind-numbing and cruel torture once you get to the back half of the levels. Treasure outdid their Konami associates but I'm starting to think their panache for genre-defying gimmicks is ill-fitting for the strictness that shmup design requires.

Intended to play Powered but wanted to give this a fair shake first. It's pretty rock-solid, not as good a mech-driven Compile shooter as MUSHA but miles above whatever Robo Aleste decided to be. Weapon system has a very unique 3-tiered system, you collect and hold up to 3 weapons at once (blue/red/yellow/green), and the attack you get is a combination of their properties. It's like Gunstar Heroes, though because all the weapons are so chaotic and different, none of the game is designed with them in mind and you don't really strategize around them, it's just cool to get a weapon and see your range and hit rate change. You can also throw away your items as bombs.

Pretty standard Compile affair outside of that - lots of empty stretches, punishingly weak default weapon when you die, levels that get too trigger happy near the end, y'know. Like Robo Aleste I really can't get behind the sound direction, the crunchy SFX and punchless guitar music has no sense of cohesion or power.

You kill a frog and its headless husk spews chunks and then you kill that and its heart crawls along the ground while its intestines follow behind, insane

If nothing else the scope and visuals are astounding, this is tech that nearly matches the peak fidelity of 32x with Nintendo's trade optimization tricks and 2D/3D hodge-podging. The change to a mission based structure is fine but these levels are extremely low effort, they're all like one hallway with 2 pincushions to shoot. The dogfights are pretty bad until you learn to cheese them with the charge shot. Music is way worse, neither rockin' nor movin', it's a shame.

It's easy to see why this was canned when the game still needed a huge amount of content to fill out the world, and the cost of FX-2 boards would eat out their profits.

Total dearth of anything to engage with, completely disrespected my time and energy. I guess I could be charitable and say the game is functionally sound and feels like a shmup should, and the 15 supporting weapons to select from are neat, but there's nothing going on in this game, there's no level design, half the bosses die from 1 bomb and the other half take 100,000 (no exaggeration) shots to the head. How do you make something like this? Debatably even worse than D-Force on sheer artistic merit

Somber platforming and an eclectic soundtrack full of waltz compositions and an oddly pervasive use of lo-fi samples and drum beats, very unique. But levels get pretty repetitive pretty quick, and bosses are generally bad.

The ending to this game is so fucked up, the original cuts to credits right after the final boss. The fan translation adds a
custom ending, but it looks total dogshit cause they just re-use sprites from the other parts of the game with no regard for proportions. It needs to be seen to be believed, it's like a dogshit newgrounds animation.

I know jack shit about Macross, that's the blue singing lady right?

I like this, I like the ship transformations and their cool weapons. This has a similar challenge factor of Thunder Force III, you have to memorize both the stages and the ideal movement and weapon tactics to deal with certain threats. Great for about 90% of the run, has a handful of bosses that feel upwards of quadruple as hard as the stages they inhabit - 1, 6 and 7 respectively. Some real Gradius Syndrome here too. You can definitely learn consistent strats to get around everything, but the meandering pace and aformentioned trouble points mean I probably won't come back to this as often as I do with Thunder Force.

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.