What are you playing right now?

Yeah the game can really screw you over sometimes. I once had a run where at level 9 I still used the starting gear as I'd only gotten "+10 damage taken" and "deal 5 damage to yourself per hit" gear haha.

You really should play Diablo 2 as the Amazon for range. Diablo 2 is infinitely better than one, gameplay wise.
I am playing the D2 remake now and it looks fantastic.

When I was a kid I watched my friend play D2 and I remember playing a little but I had no idea how it worked. I traded with some guy and he somehow hacked the game to make his inventory look like really good stuff but after I traded all I had was garbage. He had altered the item images somehow.

I remember high level people chasing me around and waiting outside the town to kill me for fun.

Watching my friend do PVP it looked like it was pretty broken too.

Can you play offline only? Is all the same content available?

>D2 remake
Maybe someday if I get a proper gaming PC. Not touching these types on console.

You can play it all offline. You could just type in diablo 2 torrent probably and download the old game.
I am playing the remake with a controller and for the most part it is much better.
You can map all the skills to buttons, unlike pc where you have to manually switch them to right mouse button, so it plays faster with controller.

Seems too loot based for me. Movement is way better though.

Diablo is a loot based game, if you don't care for that element I'd recommend seaking pasture elsewhere. Do agree that Diablo2 is far superior, though honestly I never could get into it. Always prefered the first game.

If it's very mild I'm OK with it.

Like Transformers or Horizon. Better if there's an exploit.

Or how FF12 does it where the chests have a set pool and they come back later.

Finally decided to play Kunoichi/Nightshade until the end, originally kept dropping it after a few stages. The game is a weird one. Technically it might be 'better' than Shinobi on the PS2. There's more enemy variety, more types of combat (armoured enemies, knockdown plays a roll as do launchers), but there's so much less pressure and the combat is fully the focus now instead of a part of it mixed with platforming.

The entire point seems to be to do cool Tate runs up to the 30s, sometimes even higher, instead of a clock ticking towards your doom. In one sense, cool that they tried something else, but on the other...it feels a bit empty or something.

Playing NG2 on Mentor. Just after Warrior I can already tell that I'm going to love this game on the higher difficulties, and I'm already much more comfortable with Shuriken cancels/interrupts, counter attacks and more complex strings. I'm dreading the bad parts a bit, but it seems you can skip or mitigate most of those, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Yeah you can generally 'skip' the bad parts if you know what you're doing. Sometimes literally by just running past it all, or other times by being prepared i.e. having enough healing+ninpo to skip the fight, or have specific weapon setups like having a level 3 Kusarigama when you reach Bone Dragon.

> love higher difficulties
Just you wait until you reach Master Ninja haha, it is...a rude awakening. Keep your head high! And keep us posted :)

Halfway through CH6 on Mentor. So far it hasn't been that hard. Gigadeath, the Water Dragon and the Skeleton boss were a bit of a problem but after a while I found out good strats for them. It's funny how you fail at them multiple times just to kill them in less then a minute without items afterwards.
Was also panicking a bit because the ToV in CH6 wouldn't activate and I thought it happened because I skipped the previous one (Itagaki is insane if he thinks I will spend 40 minutes getting chased by Lycantropes and IS dogs for a Jewel of the Demon Seal), but apparently it's because it gets activated later after you meet Volf.

Funnily enough I know exactly which one you mean, also had that feeling a few times before. Every few replays I think to myself "shouldn't this one be active by now...".

Generally speaking most TOVs aren't that interesting, they really upped their game with this in Razor's Edge (just a few waves of unique enemy combinations with a unique boss at the end) in favour of this "fight these same enemies for 40 mins. ToV1 is the only really great one imo. Their lack of walls also never sat well with me.

DOH-DON-PACH-CHI SAI-DAI-O-JOU
aka Dodonpachi Saidaioujou

Honing my dodging skills. Almost got to Stage 3!

Nice, I played a lot of Daioujou on emulator, didn't end up finishing it but had a good time. Very well-crafted game.

No 360 so can't play SDOJ myself, at least on physical hardware. Might run well on Xenia though? IIRC other than a delayed sound glitch, Mushi Futari runs extremely well there.

Finished NG2 on Mentor and finished CH1 on MN. Mentor wasn't that bad, died a lot but everything was manageable. CH1 on MN was brutal, so many IS Ninjas and Mages it's insane. I probably spent 3 hours on it. The jump between Mentor and MN so far is the biggest difficulty jump in the series (haven't played 3RE), maybe it gets easier later but I'm not looking forward to CH2 (not until I get the Talons that is, that forward Y is gonna be very useful).

For me the jump between warrior and mentor was much much higher than mentor and MN, though I forced myself not to use Ninpo on mentor (aside from ch11 Raetsu and CH6 ToV) and to not spam UTs, I died a lot but I was well prepared for MN. Abusing GTs can help you a lot, and with time you will learn to use them less and less while you will get better. You should also try to utilize windpath more effectively to stun enemies and for the iframes gained from it. Some weapons also have great running attacks, also useful and easier to utilize after doing windpath. Good luck!

Not a damn thing. Like Royboy, however, I prefer D1 to D2. I only played the latter as a Barbarian in place of my father (who was too incompetent with a keyboard/mouse and games to do much in the latter half of Normal). Using just his character until I grew weary of playing FOR him. D1 I played mostly co-op with family or with cheats as a boy. Either way, I don't care for alterations Nu-Blizzard had the nerve to make.

The jump to Master Ninja can be quite insane, but don't fear. It'll get easier once you get past Chapter 3 which is imo the final hurdle. After that you'll have sufficient upgrades and a good baseline of Essence to get through, there's also a free Talisman in Chapter 4 which is a great help financially.

>It'll get easier once you get past Chapter 3 which is imo the final hurdle
Just finished CH3 and it was waaaay easier than CH1 and 2 (including the ToV). Once you get the Talons at lv.2 it isn't too bad honestly, not that much harder than Mentor. Gigadeath is still cancer but I found it easier than Genshin for some reason, with his OHKO spin attack.

I always just hated Chapter 3 myself, everything I despise is in that chapter haha. Though it has the most fun ToV for sure.

That said I never really abused the Talons in the last few years. Though on my first run it was...pff. I did every dirty trick in the book. I think even Ryu was ashamed of me.

For Genshin, note that you can really safely counter nearly all his moves, which is pretty fun to toy around with.

I actually enjoyed chapter 3 a lot (besides Gigadeath of course), What do you hate about it?

I think it's overall a great chapter (and that ToV is a great bonus) with many fun encounters, even if it has one of those short and pointless shooting sections with the bow and the Van Gelf fight before Gigadeath.

I'm very uncomfortable with the enclosed spaces where you fight the Gelfs, also a few pretty insane encounters early on. But mostly the Gelfs, I was very scared of them back then due to my NGS2 trauma's of them.

Swery's game The Good Life is out.

Looks like a more comical version of Deadly Premonition with no combat.

>deadly premonition with no combat
Wut.

I think I’m done with Dread. Beat Hard(not sure what differences they were besides enemy damage output) and then another quick run through normal(I think my final time was 3:25 or something). Game is fine but doesn’t really do anything for me.

Got the Crysis trilogy on PS5 for some reason. About 2/3 of the way through Crysis 2. I will say, if I was going to play a military FPS it would probably be this one, but I still don’t think it’s anything special. It has all of the normal stuff I don’t like: reliance on cover and hitscan enemies, really boring samey weapons, lack of distinct encounters, but the energy meter is interesting. Energy is split between sprinting, high jumps, melees, and then of course the cloak and armor. The problem is that the cloak and armor themselves aren’t very interesting. It’s mostly a case of, use cloak when you’re not detected to get some free kills, and use armor once you’ve been spotted. The upgrades are also extremely lame and a couple things like the air stomp seem impossible to actually use effectively. All of that being said, I’m still enjoying it thanks to the level design and the different energy uses.

Started Blasphemous too. Haven’t played enough to really form any thoughts.

> Dread
It's pretty interesting to tinker around with some stuff, but honestly, the game is overly streamlined to the point of exhaustion. There's some funky speedruns and challenge runs going on, but most of them just highlight the problems with the combat more than make it shine imo.

> Crysis
If you can, play Warhead. It's the best one imo, has by far the best mechanics in the series. Crysis 2 severly dumbed down nearly everything the series had to offer.

> blasphemous
Let me know how it is, it's somewhere on my list but haven't gotten to it.

> playing
Currently (finally) going to beat A Link to the Past. Never beat it as a kid, always got stuck in the final dungeon. At dungeon-2 now in the Dark World. Absolute banger of a game, absolutely astonishing.

> playing
Still jamming out random arcade mode runs of MvC2, but also picked Smash Bros back up now Sora is in. There was also a Doom Slayer Mii costume released, so I've got a reason to play Mii Gunner now. I still enjoy playing every so often, doing 3-stock matches against the Lvl. 9 AI. It could probably do with being a bit harder but it's pretty fair for fighting game AI. There are occasional input-read parries, but it offers a fun challenge for the most part. Must be far and away my most played Switch game by now.

> Dread
I gather from the topic it's not one of the best Metroids, but what's the concensus then? Still worth a buy, or not?

As a stand-alone title, it is an absolutely miracle game. It's a modern interpretation of Metroid, streamlined, accesible, Samus controls like a dream, it has good bosses (for one run) and a funky story that doesn't intrude while still being a fully functioning single-player game without any DLC practices. Let me stress again, it is really a miracle we're getting a game like this in this day and age.

It's biggest fault is that it just is part of one of the absolute best single-player series of games out there. If they'd swapped Samus' model with anyone else, I'd be a stand-out game. But as a Metroid game, it takes too much steps back. Bosses are now very 'modern' in that they are 'fair' and 'methodical', with "dodge/counter now plz" flashes and all. Backtracking is so optimized you hardly notice you're doing it. You're constantly railroaded. All enviroment interaction is completely gone etc.

It's good. But far from excellent.

> Smash
So much fun, honestly the day I ditched competative play and set items to MAX was the day I fell in love with the games again.

Fatal Frame 1 battle mode, trying to S rank all the missions, did 15 of them so 5 more to go, after that I will probably do nightmare and fatal difficulties, also hoping to complete the ghost list afterwards.

Crysis - Due to CPU bottlenecks preventing stable 60fps I never played beyond the first 2 levels in both Crysis 1 and Warhead, but I recall enjoying them a lot due to their open level designs and I think the AI was also pretty good? Haven't played them in years so I hope I'm not mistaken. What makes Warhead better than 1?

Did anyone here also play Far Cry 1? I couldn't care less about the later entries (got bored with both 3 and 4 midway through), but I've always wanted to beat Far Cry 1. It can be very difficult and I think the AI is great here as well, though stealth is apparently broken. It was also developed by Crytek and has a lot more in common with Crysis compared to later Far Cry entries.

>deadly premonition with no combat
Has a town with NPCs on schedules, weather, day/night cycle.

You can transform into a dog or cat. You can attack animals and some fight back. That's the only combat you're going to see when you want their materials.

Cat can climb and jump and dog can follow scents, run faster and search rubbish bins but can't climb and can't jump high.

You can sleep to pass time like in DP. Don't need to shave (being a woman) but you can shower and do some beauty routine (doesn't show it) to raise something. Not really sure. There's all these weird mechanics I don't get and there's no info out yet.

Like you can catch a cold, toothache, headache, but nothing showing me when these will happen.

Depending in time of day/night, and whether the NPC is a cat or dog person, you can get quests (the cat/dog ones are based on a meter you can control).

You have hunger, awakeness and stress. All these annoying as fuck things to manage.

Story seems to revolve around a murder just like in DP but also other weird town stuff.

Despite all the annoying mechanics I actually like it.

> Warhead + Crysis
Crysis 1 suffers from a pretty bad campaign. It starts off pretty good, but eventually devolves into a lot of lineair corridors, turret sections and other pretty darn bad set-pieces. Only occasionally does it return to its original greatness.

Warhead is just Crysis 'optimized'. It has far, far better level design, enemy-layouts are really smartely constructed and promote usage of your abilities far more.

One fun thing I always loved is how on the highest setting enemies actually speak Korean, so you can't listen in on their tactics (unless you speak Korean ofc.)

> Far Cry 1
Was a big fan of this game when it came out. The first few missions are probably some of the best open-world FPS gameplay you'll get out of that generation, or at all, period. I really didn't enjoy from the second the mutants appear though. They are such insane bulletsponges it really trips the game up. I played the pre-mutant missions for ages though.

Crysis - Without a doubt what made me enjoy it is the open level design, disappointed to hear it ditches it for linear levels later on, good to hear about Warhead though. I might try them again soon depending on their performance (not the remaster though).

Far Cry 1 - I have started it at least 3 times in the last 3 years (always on realistic difficulty, really challenging), always ditched it in the middle but not because I was bored or too annoyed, even though the quality definitely dips with the bullet spongey mutants. It seems that just like Crysis, it shines in the open levels and suffers in the more linear levels?

Agreed about the first 5 chapters though - They are always fun. So I guess I'm not the only one who enjoyed this far more than FC3/4?

Speaking of Far Cry, have you ever tried any of the Instincts game?

> farcry
It's a hard narrative. Far Cry is really a series that had a changed perspective over the years. When it came out, FC3's reinvention of the series really was great. But now that it's been milked dry, a lot more people are falling in love with FC2 again which was despised when it released.

FC1 is too different, it might as well be called "Crysis Zero" at this point imo.

> Crysis
The joy of the gameplay system is that it throws you into a huge playground with funky abilities and asks you to just have fun/experiment. Warhead plays more into this since the first game is a bit too tech-demo'y. Crysis 1 is a techdemo that turned into a game. Warhead was designed to be a game.

Crysis 2 is a good example of being a tad too optimized. You automatically use "Strength" when punching for example, and Armour is on by default etc. while making levels more lineair since you obviously have less tools so they need to make gameplay more strict as well.

Which is a shame. I think the city-setting in Crysis 2 would've been grand for an open-leveled shooter.

> Smash
I think the beauty of Ultimate is that it caters excellently to all crowds. If you want to play it as a competitive fighter, you can. If you want to do max items and embrace the chaos, you can. Wanna play something in between? You can. Want to use spirits outside of the story mode for some combat modifiers? You can! There's a stupid amount of options you can mess about with. I think there's probably some untapped potential in using spirits to create some interesting rulesets.

> Metroid (Dread)
That sounds pretty positive for a 2021 game! The series is one I've been meaning to get around to for ages. I don't really have any Metroidvania experience so I'd probably jump in with the Prime games.

> Crysis
Not played any of these, but Warhead sounds promising. I might look in to it. I've always been aware of the series and thought the concept of the suit was cool, but just assumed it was another "military FPS" with a bit of a gimmick tacked on.

Never played FC2, but it's probably the same routine of hating on a game and then liking it again all of a sudden after newer game(s) release?

Even if I'll ignore the milking of Far Cry for a moment, I still remember enjoying FC3 back at release, but after a while it just got too same-y and repetitive for me. I enjoy games with big levels to explore and experiment within like Prey, Dishonored, Deus Ex etc... but I'm not into open world games so that might be a part of the problem.

The series definitely changed after 1 and Instincts, which is more linear and gives you feral abilities.

Crysis 1 and Warhead simply didn't sell well enough so Crytek decided to go a different route with 2 and 3, which is shame IMO since I really wish we would see the gameplay of FC1 and Crysis being expanded upon without turning into a full open shooter.

Crysis was also held back by becoming a console-game. Crysis Warhead is still PC-exclusive, while Crysis 2 and 3 were day-one console launch titles, which severly hampered their structure.

> Greg
Metroid is definitely worth giving a go. Personally I'd say Prime is a great introduction. And Crysis is honestly really, really good for a western military shooter. Definitely recommend it one time.

I forgot to mention that I picked up Cruis'n Blast when it came out on Switch a few weeks ago. I was quite excited to have a "proper" arcade game come to a console, it gave me a bit of nostalgia for the days of getting arcade ports on the sixth-gen consoles.

Unfortunately, I'm sad to say the game was a bit disappointing, and I was surprised to see so many positive reviews for it. I think it should have been cheaper for the amount of content you get, as the "new" tracks exclusive to the Switch version are just bits of the existing tracks cut-and-pasted together, and can be less than a minute long. The racing gameplay isn't particularly interesting, so a lot of the appeal comes down to the spectacle of being a able to race as a Helicopter, or a Unicorn, or a Fast-and-Furious style pimped up Nissan GT-R. I was hoping it'd be a good alternative to Mario Kart on game nights, but I'm not sure how much of it me and my friends will play. It's the sort of game that's a 5/10 on a good day.

@Raeng
>gelfs
The purple ones might be the easiest enemies in the game. Low aggression (especially off camera) and low damage compared to almost every other enemy. The golden ones can be a problem but they still get delimbed very easily, so they aren't that big of a deal.

Also, speaking of FC, how's FC2? It looks interesting from what I've seen, insane attention to detail, but I was wondering if there was more to it than just that.

Yeah like I said, it's mostly just a mental thing. When I hear that sound they make I instantly get PTSD to the insanely tanky Black Van Gelfs with tons of OHKO attacks that rushed poor n00b-Raeng haha.

> FC2
From what I know (haven't played it) it's one of the great open world shooters and the biggest fun in it is not doing the story but just exploring finding diamonds. Make of that what you will!

> Cruise n Blast
Sorry to hear it Greg! I remember seeing that game and thinking it looked really cool, shame to hear it isn't up to snuff.

Started to pick-up Death Stranding again (my 100% run), was surprised by just how relaxing and tense the game is to play depending on how you manage your routes/inventory. Took a few really large orders that had me use floating-carriers, which lowered my mobility by a large amount, so I had to circumvent areas with B.Ts lest I get absolutely nuked from orbit. In said run I also was juggling multiple orders for numerous locations, so near the end stamina became quite the issue going up some mountains.

It's surprising just how much little mechanics at play here make for such an interesting game. I honestly could never tire of it.

Beat Crysis 2 on the hardest difficulty, it really wasn’t hard at all when you realize the entirely dominant approach is: cloak when not detected, armor when detected. I feel like this game(or series) kind of laid the groundwork for a how a lot of modern AAA games handle their combat scenarios: large areas that are pretty indistinguishable from each other, enemies kind of just scattered randomly, basic stealth to thin the herd until you eventually get spotted, then you fight your way out with basic combat. I was shocked that my final playtime was only 8 hours; it felt way longer than that due to how unbelievably samey every fight was.

The game has a bunch of other problems that I completely expected: there’s glitches and bugs everywhere, the upgrades are totally lame and should have just been part of your abilities, the weapons are just boring hitscan modern guns, and there’s turret/vehicle/big enemy sections that suck. All that said, I still sort of enjoyed the game.

Blasphemous is decent so far. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be another game that wants me to parry stuff constantly since I’m completely over that style of combat. The “wait for counter/parry/dodge signal” thing needs to die. I’m not playing games with that shit anymore. So far it doesn’t seem like it leans into this too much though. Usually I can kill enemies before they even get an attack out. The level design is pretty good and there’s a nice challenge too.

>death stranding
I’ve been playing the PS5 version. Started on Very Hard, was really crazy to see how fast timefall ruined my containers. Should be interesting to go through this again.

> Crysis
I cannot stress this enough: play Warhead or the original Crysis at the very least. If you enjoyed Crysis 2 in any shape or form, those two games will feel like the second coming of Christ to your gaming library.

> counter neon flash of doom
It and "learn how to dodge this pattern" are like the Nolan Batman films to me: they don't age very well. I think the parry-focused games tend to really promote 'feel good fast' gameplay. You feel pretty good at the game pretty fast, like if you compare Dread to Super combat. In Dread, you feel like a monster like 10 seconds in. In Super, you feel like an idiot playing it half the time until maybe 3-4 playthroughs in when you're super comfortable with her movement and avoiding attacks. The latter, ironically, feels way more satisfactory a few runs in. But the former feels super satisfactory immediately.

> death stranding PS5
Motherfucker hahaha I want that shit so bad. Even if I think they added all the wrong things, I want it hahaha.
I'm still playing the PS4 version, trying to 100%. Some are pretty hard to 5-star, since you need to do a lot of funky things.

That said, just so enjoyable to play. Especially if you sometimes get into weird situations like ambushed by Mules while you don't have guns, or stumble upon a BT zone with two floating cargos next to you. Those are the best moments imo.

>crysis
Warhead definitely seems the most interesting to me, I’ll probably do that next. Watched some videos of 3 and I don’t really understand it. You can just cloak and continuously shoot arrows?

>parry focus
Sekiro is another example of immediate satisfaction vs long term satisfaction. First few times you death blow? Amazing. But after 40 hours of parrying attacks with the occasional dodge or jump, the novelty really wears off, and you realize the game just doesn’t have the same life that something like even Souls has.

>PS5 death stranding
Yeah I don’t really understand a lot of the additions(kart racing? The fuck?) but even the controller vibrations and very hard really have made this a new experience for me. Game looks fantastic too.

>problems during delivery
I wish more of the game was just really intense delivery scenarios, but I get that the feeling and atmosphere of the game wouldn’t be the same if that was the case. Shame we finally got a unique big budget game and it seemed to really underperform. Game barely scraped 6 million in sales afaik, meanwhile god of bore and spidermanarkhammordorcreed both topped 20 million. This is why we’ll never get groundbreaking games anymore.

> Death Stranding
I really wished they'd focused more on the unique aspects as you note. For example, the game ends on quite a unique setpiece where you're basically in an 'instanced' exploration. It would've been cool to have a few more of those instead of just 'the one'. Also wished hazards would play a bigger role than they do now (how many instances do you recall where wind is an issue?).

I do love that Kojima and Co. at least tried to make something unique. But with the "directors cut" suddenly going OH BOY SHOOT DEM GUNZ DRIVE DEM TRUCKS YEEHAAAW it's a bit...what? Did you play your own game? I do like how trolly it is though. You've got all these guns, but the game still nukes itself if you use them. I do hope the game was succesful, but Koji noted back during Covid that it wasn't in a pretty painful way. He was asked how he kept predicting the future (i.e. MGS2 and now COVID with Deathstranding). To which he noted something along the lines of "if I could tell the future, I'd have made a good sellin game instead of Death Stranding". OUTCH.

That said, it still is my absolute favourite game of the generation. Definitely left a mark on me, not gonna lie.

> crysis 3
You know your series is down the shitter when people that liked Crysis 2, despite its failings, didn't even want to touch Crysis 3.

I think I will be finishing Project Warlock. I'm really enjoying it! I'm probably going to play a few dark games since it is still Halloween. How is today everybody?

Finished Link to the Past and Kunoichi/Nightshade yesterday, both of them. The former really was a fantastic game, glad to say I finally beat it after all these years. Final dungeon was honestly pretty brutal, was surprised by how well it all held together.

Nightshade was 'okay'. It's still a great game, but Shinobi really etches it out in nearly every way possible for me.

Project Warlock looks really cool btw!

^ What do you think of ALttP in comparison to the Oracles and ALBW?

It's a great game that does so many things right on the first go, it's honestly kind of amazing to me since it was such a big change in some respects to the previous two games. Some little details irk me like how hitting things with the sword doesn't pick it up. But there's so much little fun interactions and hidden weaknesses like how the Hookshot damages foes, how you can use the pegasusboots to run into a wall and use the bounce to jump over ledges - it's insanely deep.

I do feel the dungeons aren't that great though. They have some really unique ideas, but generally they feel more flat and I vastly prefer the Oracle and Awakening dungeon-concepts. The bosses are also a bit laughable tbh since most are just a dps-fest.

You?

Bangai-O Spirits for the Nintendo DS, by Treasure. This game is fucking amazing, oh my god.

There is an optional tutorial that's 22 short levels and contains the only NPCs in the game, who just fuck around and say random shit. After you finish, one of them asks if he can sell the game used now.

Otherwise, the meat of the game is a pile of 160ish levels with no progression whatsoever, you can play anything whenever you want. The time to complete each level ranges from a few minutes to less than 5 seconds.

From what I've played, this is Treasure at their most unhinged. Someone there, at some point, had an idea: "What if we make mechanics that are so good that we can do whatever the fuck we want with level design?" A bunch of the levels feel like shitposts that someone made in 5 minutes, but are somehow tons of fun to play.

EX attacks use meter to launch a massive spray of projectiles out. You can charge it up for more missiles, and the amount and size of them scale based on the amount of enemy projectiles near you when you fire (which are deleted afterwards). This can produce massive, glorious slowdown as the sheer amount of projectiles onscreen screeches the DS to a halt for a few seconds.

You have a loadout of 2 primary fires and 2 EX attacks, which you can choose from a list. The 5 core types can be equipped as primary fires or EXes: Bounce bounces off walls and towards enemies, Homing does what it says, Break pierces 1 bullet, and Napalm explodes. If you equip two of these for one attack type, they "MIX" which combines both effects.

For primary only you can equip Shield, which is a movable shield that stays next to you and can be repositioned, Sword, which slashes through bullets in front of you, and Bat, which is a baseball bat that knocks back enemies and deflects projectiles, but has downtime between swings.

For EXs only you have Direct, which aims directly at enemies for you (and can be MIXed), Reflect, which bounces back all enemies and projectiles near you, and Freeze, which timestops all enemies and projectiles onscreen for a short time.

The mechanics are so obviously systemically linked that it's a joy to experiment. For instance, you can launch an EX volley at a baseball bat robot, let him deflect the shots back, then use them to massively power up another EX while he's still in the swing endlag. Napalm explodes on impact, so it's great against the sword robots, or you can bounce shots off walls to hit them in the back. A knocked back enemy will eat bullets as it flies through the air, and can collide with other enemies which knocks them back in turn.

The cherry on top is that every level was made with the in-game level editor, and you can load up any of the levels Treasure made and change them however you want (as well as making your own obviously). It's like making a Doom level, but easier.

Being able to jump in and enjoy some bite-sized action whenever I want has made my gamer spirit feel a little lighter. Gets my highest recommendation.

Game sounds super interesting. Made me look up if I could get my hands on the Dreamcast version, is that game worth it? Or just stick to the DS version?

They are different games, the four are Bangai-O N64, Bangai-O Dreamcast (this is supposed to be a port of N64 but they changed so much that it's basically a different game), Bangai-O Spirits for DS, and Bangai-O HD Missile Fury for X360. I've only played Spirits, the guy I talked to who has played all 4 said Spirits was the best.