60 Years of Misery...and Then You Die!!!

Recently downloaded Ikaruga, a 2D, top-down shooter for XBox. I remember playing it on a friend’s Dreamcast years ago and being mind-boggled by the whole experience. It’s a simple concept (all enemy ships are either white or black, you can swap between the two colors, absorbing same colour bullets, doing more damage against opposing colour ships), that rightly should be classified a puzzle game rather than a shooter.

As the attack patterns are deterministic, the emphasis is on memorising and replaying, but seriously, who has that kind of time. At only five levels short, it’s not an insurmountable task to remember when to to move here or shoot there, but my brain just isn’t up to the task.

So what do you do? You cheat. It’s not big, it’s not clever, but when you’ve spent all weekend trying to get to level 5 of game that has no real-world value, at the detriment of any social life you thought you had going, it’s the only option left.

In my defence, by cheat, I mean watch videos on youtube of Japanese teenagers playing through it. But, as always within the ‘tube, one video leads to another, to another, to another, until I landed on the one below. Apparently the work of one man, the brilliantly titled ‘Imperishable Night’, part of a Japanese game series called the Touhou Project, falls within a sub-genre of the 2D shooter called ‘bullet hell’. Taking the shooter to it’s extreme, the game is a testament to one person’s vision, regardless whether anyone else understands or even wants it (as it goes, this stuff is lapped up in it’s home country).

So now, whenever I’m stuck, close to giving up or even worse, about to throw the controller through the screen, I just think, ‘At least I’m not playing this’…