KI-RAI-JIN (PC doujin)

[Despatche]

Our lord and savior bunaguchi has graced us with a more traditional shmup.

Well. Sort of. It's a SUPER WIDE vertical. You'll probably want to go into the options and make the screen bigger (restart the game to change the size). Apparently this is intended to be played on two normal 16:9 monitors.

The controls are a little weird... actions are on WASD. S shoots, while WAD do special attacks with that meter that fills up as you destroy things. Seems to be some kind of caravan thing too. Try running the HTML manual through a translator?

This SYAKERAKE site is kinda cool. Reminds me of itch.io, but it's Japanese. Maybe we should give bunaguchi our moneys... Shadow Break is on here too.

[M.Knight]

I just gave it a try and cleared the normal difficulty.
It seems to be a 3-minutes score-based shmup but with some slight tower-defense influences. At least, the way you can set up mines on the sides of the screen to preemptively destroy bigger enemies before they fire reminds me of that kind of games. However there isn't any incentive not to let enemies fire and survive other than personal survival and score, as there isn't anything to actually defend.

The concept is fine but I feel that he effectiveness and usefulness of mines is not that great and the game doesn't really revolve around them in its main game loop, as you can simply shoot instead of using the forward mines, and only a few waves spawn on the sides. Besides, i don't even think the mines are that useful against waves with several enemies, but I haven't checked exactly if you can take out an entire wave with just one mine.

If you try to score, I imagine the mine-base game loop becomes a lot more interesting, but so far I am not sure there is enough to make want to put a lot more credits into it. Despite an original and thought out game idea, I didn't instantly feel the little oomph and raw energy to captivate me.

When you play it in fullscreen, the game only uses one monitor even if you have two. I may have missed something in the config file or options but in any case it's perfectly playable on a single 16:9 screen.

[Shepardus]

Nice find, Despatche. Interesting little game, I do like to see people play around with the aspect ratio. Laying mines kind of reminds me of the bomb subweapon in Dangun Feveron, except there are warnings for every enemy wave. As it is, though, it feels more like a proof of concept than a full game. The mechanics could probably be explored more, and it could really use some more enemy variety - the ones in the game already felt old by the end of the three minutes, though it does get fairly intense if you're trying not to miss any enemies.

Some of my notes on the game:

• You move faster when you're not shooting. I totally missed this until my third play...
• Scoring revolves around not letting enemies escape, collecting score items (the S icons), and not getting hit. There's a hit counter that increases when you kill enemies, and resets when an enemy escapes or you take a hit. Each score item you collect is worth (10 * hit counter) more than the previous one. For example, if the last score item was worth 500 and your hit counter says 22 when you pick up the next score item, it will be worth 500 + 220 = 720. Dropping score items doesn't affect anything other than missing out on that score item.
• The game has a replay system. Save replays from the main menu. Save replays from the main menu, play them by dragging the replay file onto the executable. This is explained in the manual too, but I didn't see that at first.

I haven't checked exactly if you can take out an entire wave with just one mine.

You can.