New 1-credit clears! Axelay, M.U.S.H.A., Cho Aniki, and Other Nonsense Words

Spring is such a wonderful season for shoot-em-ups. God knows you can't play them all year round, but in the spring, you can. I'm a terrible player, but I've finally developed the method and Schedule I prescriptions necessary to clear extremely easy shooters in roughly five years apiece. Mostly that means sticking to old 16-bit stuff on Wii VC; I'm fonder of later arcade and XBLA games like Strania or Under Defeat, but I haven't improved to the point that I can clear them. Plus, fuck rank.

This week I finished a somewhat controversial 1CC of Axelay, one probably not destined for the record books at Win Galaxies. So whenever I pick up the game I play out the remaining credits of my last suspend state for practice; I was busy all weekend, but when I picked up last week's suspend I ended up clearing the game. Some key notes:

• The game lets you map Shot and Missile to different buttons or to the same (like later Gradii). Naturally, most people will put them on the same button - but they'll be displeased when they reach the final boss's mirror phase, where he fires shots when the player does and missiles when the player does. And if the player fires shots and missiles at the same time, so will he, and that'll create an undodgeable attack pattern. So ten hours in I had to relearn to play the game with two buttons (harder than it sounds, because there's a lot of trigger fluttering).
• I like the weapon select, but it's oddly balanced. Once you get a new weapon in each category, you'll never use the previous ones - they're not objectively worse, but they don't complement each other correctly. And one weapon, Spinneroo, I couldn't comprehend in the slightest.
• The rotating vulcan weapon that starts firing backward and angles forward as you hold the button is enough to base a game around. It puts timers and technique into an independent aiming mechanism, like a cross between dual stick (because it's independent of ship movement) and reverse options (because it has its own traversal time).
• The vert stages would be better if they weren't multiple screens wide. The breadth is meant to offer different paths through the stages, but it ends up being like Life Force's split routes, where you just choose one early on and always take it. Ultimately it just adds confusion and ambiguity to an already difficult-to-read style of presentation. 

Overall I liked it a lot. Naturally it's reminiscent of Gradius and Life Force, but the weapon-swapping and management (where getting hit costs the currently equipped weapon, like M.U.S.H.A.) also adds an element of Contra III. I definitely prefer a shooter without any powering up or recovery phases; saves all the frustration and jerky pacing without dismembering the difficulty. The rules are simple, the design is lean (not a hint of popcorn), the weapons are self-consciously weird, the visuals are terrific (the artwork, not the Mode 7), and the difficulty lives in that perfect spot where screwing up hurts but doesn't undercut the momentum.

Cho Annunaki is interesting to look at too, with an aesthetic somewhere in the neighborhood of 15th century European painting crashing a train into 20th century manga. Even the buff dudes at this point feel more Classical Antiquity than Homoerotic Gaydiquity. Notes:

• It's tempting to call the game pure popcorn, with enemies and even bosses rarely hanging onto life for more than a few seconds, giving it a really soft, smooth flow. 
• Each stage has a unique enemy set that tends to conform to the same balanced triumvirate: one enemy creates barriers (the lenses in Stage 2, the alarms in Stage 3, the nautiluses in Stage 4, the helms in Stage 5), one pumps bullets onto the screen (the chess knights in Stage 2, the jerkoffers in Stage 3, etc.), and one that dive-bombs toward the player (the birds, the bees, the planes). It's a conservative style, but it does highlight the subtleties in each incarnation, like the way the lenses can be pushed back and the nautiluses fire when passed.
• This is the most tautly suspended power-up system I've ever seen. Basically the player has ten power-up levels to scale and five for each of two options, only each level takes more and more pick-ups to achieve (1 for the first, 3 for the second, 7 for the third, 17 for the fourth, 28 for the fifth, so on - the game doesn't display any of this, and only the first, third, and ninth (I think?) level-ups even result in a visual distinction). On a good run, I reach full power by the final boss of stage four (of five), and any single death shaves a good chunk off that (maybe half?). So if I've died twice, no way I have full power on the final boss. And since it takes so long to power up, I ended up essentially competing with my options, as splitting things three ways drastically slows down the leveling up, and isn't worth it in distributed firepower. 
• No extends! No hidden 1UPs either. This is true of all Masaya games I know (Gley Lancer, Cybernator, Gynoug). Extends shouldn't be underrated as a mechanism to draw the player into the scoring system and reward them for perfecting early parts of the game.
• Was there a lot of subtly sexual language in what I just wrote?

Then we've got M.U.S.H.A., my first victory over Compile (unless - is Recca considered crypto-Compile? It at least came from the same Carnival that generated Spriggan). Anyway:

• On the subject of extends, I didn't really notice them here, but the option supply is kinda accomplishing the same thing. It's really quite odd that the player can build up a huge stock of options to deploy later, never affected unless they use a continue, and it can definitely be put to use. Personally I stuck with 3-Way, Back, or Reverse for the early levels, then once I had 30+ in stock and things got bitchy, I switched to Lock. These little fellas eat bullets, too, and they're graciously fixed in place for reliable dead zones.
• Splitting the weapon power level such that picking up a secondary weapon provides an extra hit point (and getting hit costs the secondary weapon) alleviates recovery as I discussed favorably wrt Axelay, but M.U.S.H.A. goes a bit too far and strays into easy mode. With a pretty sizable invincibility frame and frequent weapon drops, the max challenge is really just to go ten or fifteen seconds at a time without getting hit. Of course, if the main power drops enough and your option supply runs out, you're pretty much fucked. So it's a very low difficulty hurdle with a steep dropoff. 
• Black hole bomb* is a crazy and awesome weapon concept (pulling enemies! in a shmup!), but it generates so much chaos on screen I ended up not using it much. At the same time, white-green laser loved covering up bullets approaching from the front, so it needed to be paired with Reverse option to last. 
• The graphics are too big.

So yeah. All three decent, fun games that I'd recommend, but I liked them in the order listed here. 

* The idea that angular momentum and energy may be transferred from a rotating black hole to a particle being scattered by it was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971. The first discussion of a runaway effect, the black hole bomb, was explored by W. H. Press and S. A. Teukolsky in 1972. If such an effect were to spontaneously occur, it may point to new physics beyond the Standard Model, and showing that black holes have "hair", as pointed out by a paper from 2017, by William E. East and Frans Pretorius.