Post by gliptitude on Jun 15, 2013 14:46:12 GMT -5
Burai Fighter is a pretty strange game that I am just now discovering and which is making a pretty big impression on me.
The game was originally released for the NES and subsequently remade for Game Boy and Game Boy color. I've been playing the Game Boy version.
For me the game is highly flawed and frustrating, but also EXTREMELY INTERESTING, and I'd like to see some of it's original concepts reapplied to new games. Also I'd like other people's opinions of these concepts, especially if you have played Burai Fighter before.
The game is a shooter. It's funny to me how this is such a pervasive genre of games and that even when I define the genre narrowly as "games were you fly around and shoot enemies" (rather than also including 1st person shooting games, platforming games with shooting, shooting games where you position a target or sight, racing games with shooting elements etc.), the genre is still one of my favorites and I am constantly amused and intrigued by the fundamental differences between various "flying and shooting" games.
The most unique concepts of Burai Fighter involve directional controls (SHOOTING and SCROLLING). The game also has a fairly unique power-up system. ... For me these features add up to something exotic and seem like strange Japanese novelties. (The awesome fantasy cover art really helped introduce the game as well).
You control a flying figure, rather than a vehicle. You can shoot in 8 directions. The screen also scrolls in 8 directions. Scrolling does not alternate routinely between sideways, vertically and diagonally, but rather is constantly changing throughout each level. At most times the scrolling is automatic but at other times it scrolls according to where the player moves. In some situations the player has to choose the correct route around an obstacle in order to avoid being crushed, (the game scrolls with you in these instances and allows you to navigate into a corner).
The automatic scrolling occasionally goes from one direction to the OPPOSITE direction. The design of the levels is somewhat like a distinct platformer game where the end goal is pursued by traveling through a maze, rather than always being at the top or to the right.
The directional shooting controls are a bit awkward and would probably be much easier with a dual stick set-up ...
Which leads me to my next wild idea - Maybe a game with these strange scrolling features would be viable with an old style 'steer and thrust' mechanic, and the precise directional shooting that goes with that control scheme!
Off the top of my head I can't really think of any steer/thrust game that has automatically scrolling levels. And actually I can only even think of two steer/thrust games that involve "levels" with more than one static screen - Gravitar and Thrust. ... Both of these games involve a gravity element, rather than the free floating navigation of Asteroids etc, and neither game has forced scrolling.
So how about a Vectrex game with multi-directional forced scrolling levels and steer/thrust controls?
It would probably have to scroll very slowly and have a modest amount of enemies in order to be playable, (think about how there is only ever at most two flying enemies in Gravitar, and think about how slow moving and spread out the asteroids are in Asteroids). But I think it could very cool and also a substantially new concept.
... In Burai Fighter there is another rare feature among scrolling shooters, in that you can touch the walls, floors, ceilings etc without dying, (except when the scrolling forces you to run out of space and get stuck). ... If you take this into consideration and imagine it also being how it would work in the steer/thrust version, it will seem like a more plausible (not insanely difficult) concept.
I suppose the steer/thrust application of these concepts would involve a vehicle, rather than a figure like in Burai Fighter, so that it could smoothly and accurately rotate with one sprite, rather than involving tons of different sprites to animate.
**** EDIT: I just tried out the NES version in emulation, (very briefly), and the scrolling seems to change directions a lot less than the Game Boy version that my impressions were based on. ... So to get what I'm talking about you might have to play the Game Boy one.
The game was originally released for the NES and subsequently remade for Game Boy and Game Boy color. I've been playing the Game Boy version.
For me the game is highly flawed and frustrating, but also EXTREMELY INTERESTING, and I'd like to see some of it's original concepts reapplied to new games. Also I'd like other people's opinions of these concepts, especially if you have played Burai Fighter before.
The game is a shooter. It's funny to me how this is such a pervasive genre of games and that even when I define the genre narrowly as "games were you fly around and shoot enemies" (rather than also including 1st person shooting games, platforming games with shooting, shooting games where you position a target or sight, racing games with shooting elements etc.), the genre is still one of my favorites and I am constantly amused and intrigued by the fundamental differences between various "flying and shooting" games.
The most unique concepts of Burai Fighter involve directional controls (SHOOTING and SCROLLING). The game also has a fairly unique power-up system. ... For me these features add up to something exotic and seem like strange Japanese novelties. (The awesome fantasy cover art really helped introduce the game as well).
You control a flying figure, rather than a vehicle. You can shoot in 8 directions. The screen also scrolls in 8 directions. Scrolling does not alternate routinely between sideways, vertically and diagonally, but rather is constantly changing throughout each level. At most times the scrolling is automatic but at other times it scrolls according to where the player moves. In some situations the player has to choose the correct route around an obstacle in order to avoid being crushed, (the game scrolls with you in these instances and allows you to navigate into a corner).
The automatic scrolling occasionally goes from one direction to the OPPOSITE direction. The design of the levels is somewhat like a distinct platformer game where the end goal is pursued by traveling through a maze, rather than always being at the top or to the right.
The directional shooting controls are a bit awkward and would probably be much easier with a dual stick set-up ...
Which leads me to my next wild idea - Maybe a game with these strange scrolling features would be viable with an old style 'steer and thrust' mechanic, and the precise directional shooting that goes with that control scheme!
Off the top of my head I can't really think of any steer/thrust game that has automatically scrolling levels. And actually I can only even think of two steer/thrust games that involve "levels" with more than one static screen - Gravitar and Thrust. ... Both of these games involve a gravity element, rather than the free floating navigation of Asteroids etc, and neither game has forced scrolling.
So how about a Vectrex game with multi-directional forced scrolling levels and steer/thrust controls?
It would probably have to scroll very slowly and have a modest amount of enemies in order to be playable, (think about how there is only ever at most two flying enemies in Gravitar, and think about how slow moving and spread out the asteroids are in Asteroids). But I think it could very cool and also a substantially new concept.
... In Burai Fighter there is another rare feature among scrolling shooters, in that you can touch the walls, floors, ceilings etc without dying, (except when the scrolling forces you to run out of space and get stuck). ... If you take this into consideration and imagine it also being how it would work in the steer/thrust version, it will seem like a more plausible (not insanely difficult) concept.
I suppose the steer/thrust application of these concepts would involve a vehicle, rather than a figure like in Burai Fighter, so that it could smoothly and accurately rotate with one sprite, rather than involving tons of different sprites to animate.
**** EDIT: I just tried out the NES version in emulation, (very briefly), and the scrolling seems to change directions a lot less than the Game Boy version that my impressions were based on. ... So to get what I'm talking about you might have to play the Game Boy one.