A GLITCHED AND BLASTED TRASH-GIVING SPECIAL
TRASHSTORM IS NOT A REAL STORY.
IS NOT EVEN GOOD FICTION.
IS TRASH GAME REVIEWS.
ALL OF THE GAMES FEATURED WOULD CAUSE A PERSON DISAPPOINTMENT,
ANGER, FRUSTRATION, DEPRESSION, MONEY LOSS INCLUDED.
TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME.
Reviewing Shit. My fate as a reviewer. This is what it had to be, right? Right? Oh, fuck...
Alright. Time for the TRASH-giving special review.
Cyberspace meets stupidity and mediocrity with Glitch Blaster's Waifu by Osando Studio and Gamuzumi.
Even DVD menus were better and more detailed than this.
The main menu is just picking icons. Since the jackasses who made this game Its my job to explain each one of them.
Play Icon: Game Start, this sends you to the game.
Dialogue Icon: Your "Manual" where the game explains you (FACT: More like "Lie to you" about being 90's and Arcade-styled)
Portrait with Pencil Icon: Gallery. This is where you can see the unlocked girls.
"A" and Kanji Icon: Change language.
As creative as the Main Menu.
After picking "Play" you'll be given the option of selecting Intro to start the game, or any of the unlocked levels, along with a bonus mode called Survival. As you can see, there's not even a stage description or a visual to give you an idea of what is waiting for you on the selected stage. Is even worse than the NES X-Men game. Remember what the Angry Video Game Nerd said?
James Rolfe wrote:First, you select a stage. Couldn't there have been something a little more interesting than just plain text? Any other game would have some kinda visual.
A group of girls were captured in Cyberspace.
Are you a bad enough dude to rescue them?
The plot is simple and a bit cliché: 20 ladies have been captured by a rogue AI and are trapped on Cyberspace, and a hacker sent a ship to engage the enemy and rescue them.
Sounds overdone, but that's how this game's story works.
Mission Objective: Hit the marks.
Well, this is the game. The objective here is to survive a level until the four girls on your sides are revealed. How do you get that, by picking items?, Defeating bosses? No. By reaching a specific amount of points per girl (10,000 for one, 20,000 for other). That's the main goal of this game. So you expect some challenge, right? Well, there's zero strategy or challenge in this game. Because all what it takes to shoot down your enemies is 1 bullet from your basic pea shooter, that's the only weapon you have in this game because there's no selectable ships with unique weaponry. There's two weapons that you can pick. The first one is a "Wave Shot" which is a wide crescent shaped shot that helps you to take down enemies on your side, if they touch the edges of the crescent of course since it's a full frontal shot. The second is the "Twin Shot" which is also a wide fire, but here's the catch: It's a short range weapon since the bullets disappear in mid-screen.
As for your defense, you're given a shield which can be used to ram enemies and rack the points faster. With the game spamming enemies like if there's no tomorrow, you might expect some heavy resistance, but guess the fuck what? EVERYONE DIES IN ONE HIT, and to make things worse, THEY DON'T DO JACK SHIT TO GET RID OF YOU, they're just a bunch of sitting ducks waiting to take a hit and die, resulting in a mindless shootout game which to add more injuries to the wound, it lacks of bosses. With a unbalanced difficult level that overfavors the player, there's no need to worry about taking a hit or dying in this game. Well, the game gives you a life bar, but no spare lives. Die once and its game over. But you can select the level where you left off. It was nice to see that the game lacks of Turridamage, so you are given a brief moment of invincibility after taking a hit, but losing your weapon due to the damage received. Also, there's no stage limit during the levels. So there's no "Mission Failed" for not reaching the required score. Its play and shoot until you hit the fourth required mark. It's a zero on every aspect: Challenge, Fun Factor and Replay Value. Reach the score marks, repeat the process four more times and you're done with this game.
But you want to know what is the real offense of this game? Like most bad indie shmups, this one uses false claims of being 90's arcade style. They might think 2010-2020's kids are stupid, but 1985's players like me are impossible to be fooled with this shit, so you can say this reviewer is made by the experience.
Enemy has been smoked, egress.
Looks like after saving the girls from Cyberspace the unnamed hacker girl saved the day against the rogue AI, Well done player, you've finished the game after playing 5 of the lamest stages out there.
Today's helluva day.
Let's go get some drinks.
Just when I was about to sentence you to a horrible death by a Beam charged at Bydo level, you threw me this. This cute girl on the beach enjoying a cold one (too bad Opus: Echo of Starsong didn't ended like this).
Fanservice is always nice, and maybe, just maybe this is what spared you from total destruction. No, forget that. Bikini girl or not, this game is still an atrocity and like many others is a fucking blight to mankind.
However, this little reward reminds me of a Mafalda comic about appreciating small profits of great losses.
Guille: Please, Can you wind up my Odnibuz, Manodito? *Breaks the toy*
Manolito: ¡WOOOW!...¡The spinning top, Guille!...¡Look at the spinning top!
Manolito: If your brother doesn't learn to appreciate the small profits
of great losses, he will be suffering a lot in this world, ¿Huh?
That last square is a metaphor sums up the whole fucking thing about reviewing trash games: Cheap trophies, cheap achievements, and sometimes an anime girl on the beach are the small profits, all of them at the great cost of playing shit-grade games. "Lesson learned" indeed.
COMFORTING THOUGHT: At least the ending of this game was better than Project Wingman's "Contract complete - Funds distributed".
More of the same thing.
Survival is the unlockable mode of this game, which is basically the same game minus the background and the rescuable girls. Instead, the idea here is to rack up a high score until you die (mostly of boredom by comitting intentional suicide). Instead of the girls unlocked, the game will display a white haired girl in different poses as you keep reaching 10,000 points which are the requirement to advance to the next level, but each level feels the same as the others with the same enemy patterns from all the original stages, so you won't be noticing the change.
The best part of the game: The city landscape.
In terms of graphics is the scenery which takes the best part of the game, especially Stage 3 with its urban setting that kinda reminds me of early shmups from the Genesis and PC Engine, while not as dark or dirty like PC Engine's Raiden or arcade-ish like Vapor Trail, the background's visual quality seems to have potential, but it is only exploited on the third stage of the game, because the next stages are a hi-tech wall and space. For a shmup, there's no sense of speed in any of the stages, making things feel way too slow and they tend to repeat in a loop way too soon, feeling like those cheap wind up dashboard toys of the 80's like the Tomy Racing Turbo or Playmates Fun-to-Drive but much worse.
I swear I saw this background before...
Stage 2 is the "Epithome of Pathetic". The first thing we will notice is that the background is the same from Learn to Play Vol. 2 - A Simple Shooter, just with a darker palette. Not only that, it recycles the majority of enemies while introducing a few new ones.
UPDATE: The background is "Top Down River" from Open Game Art done by the artist "ansimuz".
Thanks to Shmups forum member mamonu for the information.
They...didn't...pulled...an effort...
Those are your girls, your amateur pixel art that pulls the "Look at me! I'm 16-Bit". For a shmup that uses the word "Waifu", I expected a little better, but Osando Studio took the word "Generic" to a whole new level of lame. The artwork is hardly recognizable as anime styled and the bodysuits are flat colored with lack of details to make it look futuristic (Ex: The pilot suits from R-Type Final 2). If I had to make a joke about this I would say those are rejected Totally Spies! characters. As if Marathon eat them and barfed them out. The portraits on Survival Mode while they look better, they are not your high definition image, instead they were digitized to a Gameboy Advance grade, but despite that you can see the illustrations greatly resembles AI Art.
A perfect example.
If a game developer wants to put the word "Waifu" to work, they should learn from other anime-themed games (both arcade and doujin/indie). Rayging Blue's Conflict Warred is one of them, especially the girl that appears at 4:03 (her name is "Hikaru" if you want to know).
Back to Glitch Blaster's Waifu again, the music is in the "meh" level as we have jazzy beats that sound like an intro of a generic hip-hop song, along with ambient-electronic paces that doesn't help on bringing more to the action, giving as a result a totally forgettable soundtrack.
GLITCH BLASTER'S TRIVIA
- After reaching 110,000 points in Survival Mode, the images repeat.
- Wanna see the Survival mode pics without the need of playing this shit? Here you go. You can thank me later.
Sorry, but Galaxy's quote is all what it needs to sum up this game.
In the end we've got a recycle of a crappy EastAsiaSoft shmup that already failed before, with false advertising blurb to catch unaware players and with reject Totally Spies! ripoffs that would make any TS fan puke on this game. While the cutscene artwork might be a saving grace, it doesn't help too much due to the "digitizing" and notorious use of AI art on them.
If you need a 90's arcade shmup with a "Waifu" on it, try Aero Fighters 2 (Mao Mao to be exact) or Blazing Star. Sorry, Glitch Blaster's Waifu. You get the F, but in verb "qualification" (sorry, COD nerds), Zero, F- (eff minus) in my book.
Eda knew this would be a disaster.