Zero Wing

a genuinely funny game. absolutely a quarter muncher with some of its design (bullets aren't numerous but are particularly fast) but with the assist options it's a decent time. unfortunately this isn't the meme version, but despite not knowing much about the game i still found the amount of options more than satisfying. probably not the best shmup to practice scoring with but at least an interesting one to me!

10/10 memes, 9/10 port, 5/10 actual gameplay. Seizer beam is a neat idea but doesn't amount to all that much in practice here and is useless against bosses - seriously, this is THE game where bosses summoning a few helper enemies would be a good idea and it's not done? Fast bullets is something you can learn to deal with, but fast homing shots often feel downright unfair. Your bits/options/drones/multiples/whatever block everything and deal crazy damage yet bounce off some enemies, making it unclear if you can effectively melee something with them or not. Sometimes foreground elements will obstruct your view - having the CRT shader on partially helps with the most egregious case of this (metallic net), but it still gets in the way. Played until stage 5 on arcade settings but then gave in and used savestates due to a long section with basically nothing happening followed by a tricky boss. Overall, it's not exactly a terrible game one should not touch, but kinda mediocre with its "killer feature" not being fully realized either. This would be a thumb sideways if it could be, but without such an option it's a thumbs up for a solid port. You decide if it's worth it for you. P.S.: why on earth is the Linux version compiled with sanitizers enabled? This just so happens to break mangohud, but I'm also confused why is a debug feature enabled in a release build.