Warning: The following Blog contains crappy cell phone pics, editing, and plushies

I'm going to admit that I'm pretty narrow minded about what I like. By and large if a game doesn't appeal to me aesthetically, and game playwise, I'm generally not going to like it. Even then, I do make a point to try new things every now and then because you never know what you could be missing out on. And I'm just enough of a narcissist to assume you're going to enjoy reading about my experiences doing so!

I've never been to huge on shoot em ups in generally. Its not that I inherently dislike them, but they've just never grabbed me in the few occasions that I've tried them in arcades as a kid. That said, I've been seeing more, particularly the famous Bullet Hell series, Touhou, and I had to admit that getting really good at one of them definitely seems really fun. When playing No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle after it came out, I got pretty side tracked playing the shoot em up mini game Pure White Lover Bizarre Jerry 5. I figured "Hey, this is pretty fun, maybe I should try a more serious one". The end result of that idea was buying the popular Giga Wing for the Sega Dreamcast.



Okay, so its more of a standard shoot em up than an actual bullet hell game, but give me a break! Beginners have to start somewhere. The game is a standard shoot em up, sometimes bordering on bullet hell. The player is equipped with a recharging deflector shield that reflects enemy shots back at them, as well as for your gun and bombs that can take out the entire screen. So you're more well equipped than in other games in this genre.




And of course I died, and died, and died. As the "Continue?" screens continued to pop up, I couldn't shake the though of how much money would be flying out of my pocket if I was actually playing this in an arcade. Of course with unlimited continues, it didn't really take me too long to reach the final boss.




Of course I eventually defeated him. The real fun came when I inadvertently spent hours upon hours of trying to master the game afterwords, trying to beat my old score, trying to die considerably less. It was one of those things were you didn't realize just how fast time flew by.

My overall feelings of the experience could be described as "fun, but overwhelming". I'm not really sure if or when I'm going to give another shoot em up a try, but if I come across one I'm probably much more likely to give it a go.

I guess the overall message I want you to get out of this is that trying new things is, frustrating, addictive, and time consuming.