Tumiki Fighters (PC)

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Frederik
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Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2005 7:14 pm

Tumiki Fighters (PC)

Post by Frederik »

Kenta Cho alias ABA Soft is well know to anyone that owns a PC and has looked into the realm of shoot-em-ups beyond R-Type and Raiden (which I guess is anyone of you) - mostly for the excellent tiny abstract shooters rRootage (that borrows playmodes from Ikaruga, Gigawing and Psyvariar) and Noiz2Sa (that has been ported to many other platforms including the PSP).

One of the lesser known freeware shooters is TUMIKI FIGHTERS. First of all, it`s a horizontal shooters this time, it`s not entirely 2D but uses texture-less polygons for its graphics, and it`s awesome. And it has great music. And it has one of the greatest game ideas since Ikaruga in my opinion.

But lets start a little bit slower. Once you downloaded this little gem from here http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e.html , and started it, you find yourself thrown into some kind of toy world, built entirely from toy blocks, including your ship and all of your enemies. Speaking of them, the first bunch appears. You shoot them, and if you by accident crash into on of them after you shot them down, they - tadaa! surprise surprise! - stick to your ship. Every one of them, no matter what size (the game even gives you the hint by saying "CATCH ME!" when you shoot down the first ship, which is nice - I love self-explanatory games!). Now I guess most of you know Katamari Damacy, and when I played that I got instantly reminded of Tumiki, that was released BEFORE Katamari. I wouldn`t be surprised if some of the Namco developers had their hands on Tumiki before getting the idea for Katamari.



So you continue to shoot down enemies, catch them, and gets points for the moment you catch them and continuously if they keep stuck to you. If any enemy bullet hits one of your attached parts they get blown of. So enemy ships and parts increase your score, and you try to keep them by dodging enemy bullets. The pieces stuck to your ship also fire in individual ways and independently - a bit like in G-Darius, but not very strong.

Over time, your ship grows, and you are having a hard time keeping ship parts stuck to yours. At some places, bullet patterns get so dense that you can`t avoid losing them, but you can suck them in via button press, much like pulling in your belly (if you`re fat). Plus, your speed decreases, which is good for more precise movement, even though your normal ship speed isn`t particularly fast, and your fire angle gets fixed.

I forgot mentioning that one - the ship fire bends into the direction you`re moving (think of the side pods of the green ship in DoDonpachi), which is good if you want to mow all over the screen, but is a bit unconvenient if you want to damage a huge battleship (or gigantic toy, as the game names it) but can`t barely move between a bunch of bullets. Your only shot is a powerfull but thin stream, so killing enemies need more aiming than your usual shooter.

All those good things come with a bit of a tradeoff, though - while your collected clusters can`t be shot off when sucked in, they also aren`t there to protect you. You also can`t take up pieces during that moments. And you get only a FIFTH of the score you would usually get. Remember that all those pieces give you points at certain time intervalls. The game doesn`t keep track of the amounts of pieces or anything, so its mostly how LONG you can keep them.

So one the one hand, you want a high score (or maybe you don`t, but in this case you`re taking away ALL the fun of Tumiki Fighters so you might move over to another game) and this is achieved by leaving the conquered pieces out as long as possible. On the other hand, you don`t want them to be shot off.



So this is the stroke of genius in the game design of Tumiki Fighters: You are constanly struggling between safe play and a fifth of the score you MIGHT be able to get, and getting showered in points but getting blown of more and more of your pieces. Its anal-rententiveness versus greed.

And its not just like the pseudo-risk-reward structure of Shikigami or Psyvariar, either playing for survival or playing for score, since playing for score encourages only one behaviour ALL THE TIME (and much worse in Psyvariar than in Shiki). In our case, you must find a perfect balance between the protective mode and the five-times-the-score-mode.
You won`t play any game of Tumiki like the last one, since you`re always trying out when to keep your pieces safe and when to let them outside.

This whole mechanism results in pretty nice variations: You can keep your pieces inside, shoot down a huge ship, and let the pieces out JUST when you ship meets its center (and by letting them out you are able to collect pieces again, just to remind you), so its not stuck to the pieces on the outside of your ship but directly at its core. Repeat that, and you have many pieces while keeping the size of your ship very small, so you don`t lose them that easily and can milk them better.

When confronted with huge bosses, its the best to press the suck-in button quickly to squeeze between gaps in the barrage, and get them out again when you feel safe. This game rewards risky players as well as those that play precise and safely - there are different ways to achive highscores, so it plays differently every time.




After explaining the mechanism in details, I want to move back to the game in general. Unlike the other mentioned ABA games, this one has fixed levels, no level selection, and the enemies vary in a nice amount. The levels have individual backgrounds - with trees, hills and cows fitting to the toy block theme, and extremely good music. The first level music combines acoustic guitar with some electronic stuff, hard to describe, so crank up the volume a bit and enjoy.

Like any other ABA game, you can`t configure the game in many ways, which is ok with me; you have a -lowres option here, though, to let the game run in low resolution, for those with older PCs, which is very polite, if you ask me.

The graphics are, as I said, composed with polygons without textures in many colours (it could have been a FX Chip Super NES game), plays in 2D (breaking news!) and are, um, fitting. The only complain I have is that when you`re covered up in shattered enemies, its sometimes impossible to see your hitbox (which is actually a BOX, the center of your ship, in red, because your ship is made from play blocks, if you haven`t forgot already) - especially when your pieces fire back, seeing enemy bullets can be a bit tough. The hitbox should glow like in Shikigami, that would be fine.

I guess I covered anything, well, the game is simply fun, its refreshing, it feels a lot more like a full-grown proper game than rRootage, Noiz2Sa or even Warning Forever, and its underrated. Well, actually I don`t know its underrated since I hear from it so sparsely. THIS should be a PSP port. Its also one of the games I really would like to see a superplay of.

So I hope you learned that Tumiki Fighters is a game any shmupper should have played before he or she dies (which is not too soon I hope), and to continue convincing you to play it, I pasted the link AGAIN for your convenience:

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e.html

This game kicks behind. Play it!
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