Zun?

[zimeon]

From another thread... Many people know this, but for those who don't...

I'd like to know a little more about this Zun game, I've never played it, the music is great!

"Zun" is a pseudonym for Junya Ota, a japanese guy who invents his own shmups, gives out demos for free and sells the full versions for $10 (if you happen to be in Japan, shops selling them here take the double or more). His games are known as the Shrine Maiden games: He calls his game series "Toho Project" or "project Shrine Maiden".

His games are famous for their beautiful so-called "curtain fire" bullet patterns, great music and some really wacky anime-style characters. He made 5 games for the japanese PC PC98, and has up until now made 3 games for Windows. In later years his games have become immensely popular, selling tens of thousands of copies of each Windows-game.

His three Shrine Maiden games for Windows are called Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (#6), Perfect Cherry Blossom (#7) and Imperishable Night (#8).

He has a web site at www16.big.or.jp/~zun/, where you can download demos of the games. If you don't know japanese, it might be a bit hard to navigate, but just go to Shooting Game, click on one of the games and then navigate around until you find some files to download. The files you download should be named thXtrYYY.lzh, where X is either 6, 7 or 8 (game number) and YYY is the trial version (often 013 or 003 och something). The files for the demos are about 5~10 MB big. The smaller files are just patches for the full version.

Scarlet Devil uses japanese file names, so it won't run unless you set your Windows to accept japanese as a non-unicode language (Control Panel/Languages). The other games should work, though sometimes the full versions won't install the .wav-music files if the system won't accept japanese.

There is a Shrine Maiden-only shmup site at www.shrinemaiden.com

[Blade]

Thanks alot for the help, I tried the game, it's very difficult, I love the music especially. And 10 bucks for the full version makes it awesome.

Now I just need to find a way to 'port Psyvariar 2 to my PS2 and I'm all set...anyone know how to play import games? I don't know anything about soldering mod-chips so other alternatives would be nice.

[magnum opus]

y'all are new here aren't you?
its partly the fault of the relaunch we don't have the thread library we used to (speaking of which shouldn't there be a highscore thread).

but yeah I only own PCB but it was definitely worth the price of admission.
can't 1CC it in normal (yeah I'm weak) got to triple boss with the musical instruments.
probably one of the more imitated games in the doujin scene

[BrianC]

Actually, a fourth PC Shrine Maiden game has been released, but it's not a shmup. I think the name of it is Immaterial and Missing Power.

[Dino_246]

Yes, Immaterial and Missing Power, or IaMP for short, is a fighting game made by Tasogare Frontier, the makers of the rather popular dojin fighter Eternal Fighter Zero. The game is heavily projectile based, so if that's not your cup of tea, don't even bother with the game. The music is a mixed bag, some tracks are awesome, some just get annoying after hearing them 3+ times. The story mode, however, playes very different from a normal fighter, bosses go into spellcard trances like in the shmups of the series and start to hit you with powerful attacks, sometimes really cheap. Most of the time you find yourself repeating the same tactic over and over again to get past the spellcards rather than actually trying to mix up moves and comboes vs. your opponent, since their cheap spellcard attacks won't allow you to do so. This got pretty annoying for me, since most of the time in story mode, you are fighting the enemies in spellcard trances. There is also not much gameplay besides vsing the comp and story mode, however, unless you can find another that has the game and plays it......eventually the cpu gets predictable, even on the hardest setting, and the game loses it's entertainment factor.

Knowing what Tasofro did with EFZ, i'm pretty sure that they'll release patches and add more characters. My guess is that the characters will come in expansion discs that you have to pay for, like EFZ.