A vertical STG where you wiggle the joystick back and forth to melee attack on your flanks. It is painful to play the way it was intended--slamming my arcade lever back and forth for a play session not only felt horrible, but also seemed potentially damaging--so it's nice that the ports of the game include the ability to map auto-wiggling to a button.
This, however, sort of breaks the game? The melee side attacks are not only incredibly powerful, but integral to scoring; and with the auto-wiggle, both scoring and surviving the first level becomes essentially automatic. Of course, the difficulty increases dramatically from there, but I couldn't help but feel weird and distracted throughout as I "cheated" many of the game's enemy patterns.
That's not the biggest deal in the world, really -- there's still plenty of difficult shmup gameplay here if you want it -- but, after a couple rounds, I concluded that this particular blend of melee, zero-damage bombs (they just provide a field of invincibility from bullets), and rather ineffectual vulcan shot just isn't for me.
This, however, sort of breaks the game? The melee side attacks are not only incredibly powerful, but integral to scoring; and with the auto-wiggle, both scoring and surviving the first level becomes essentially automatic. Of course, the difficulty increases dramatically from there, but I couldn't help but feel weird and distracted throughout as I "cheated" many of the game's enemy patterns.
That's not the biggest deal in the world, really -- there's still plenty of difficult shmup gameplay here if you want it -- but, after a couple rounds, I concluded that this particular blend of melee, zero-damage bombs (they just provide a field of invincibility from bullets), and rather ineffectual vulcan shot just isn't for me.