ESCHATOS

A beautiful classic shmup close in caliber to Mushi and Crimzon. The space invader part is iconic. It comes with 2 modes (original and advanced) and various difficulty levels (gets really hairy at high difficulty). Also a solid port (quick restart, leader board, replay, stage select, ...). The only important feature missing is boss (and mid-boss) select in order to practice them. Nevertheless, a must have and play.

edit: finally got the 1CC on normal. Absolute kino. The final boss is nasty. Came off of playing Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles. This is more of a typical arcade-style bullet-hell shmup, without a directly-presented story, but it has the same inimitable charisma that those games have with its presentation, flowing contiguously from stage to stage as you fight alien crafts and UFOs in the skies and in space. You can see a straight through-line from this to Ginga Force, with the same kind of dynamic 3D presentation and camera. The basic functionality is similar. You have a focussed shot, a spread shot and a shield that functions like the shields in Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles. Bullet visibility is usually fine, but there are definitely occasions where you'll die and not understand what hit you. Particularly, there are issues where the game has ambiguous depth and it isn't clear what is on your plane and what isn't, though the game does attempt to remedy this by displaying the numerical difference in depth between you and the enemy entities. Also, sometimes enemies suddenly spawn very close to the bottom of the screen in a way that seems unfair. In terms of the general game design, though, the enemies and bullet patterns are great. You have a lot of variety, fun gimmicks, and in particular the strengths of your shot types are very defined & distinct which forces you retain situational awareness while avoiding bullets. The shield is an ingenius variation on the usual bomb, where it can be used as both a genuine tactical move to negate bullets and a "get off me!" panic button like the bomb in typical shmups - but it might deplete faster than you realise and lead you to a quick death. And you need extra awareness since backing off in a panic might back you into a bullet that your frontal shield won't negate, and moving sideways through a dense bullet pattern requires an extra level of foresight. Overall this game is an easy recommend if you like arcade-style shmups. There's a roughness to it, but if you get past that the actual mechanical and enemy/bullet design is multifaceted & varied to an unusual extent, and it's something you can understand as a casual player without getting into scoring systems or advanced play. This is a real gem.