Man, is this the Comiket of terrible control schemes? You may as well just give yourself Carpal Tunnel now. Sky Fight uses the same control as Joust or Balloon Fight that involve rapidly tapping a button just to stay afloat. That’s okay in the party/free-for-all mode, but then they demand precise control in the single player modes. That doesn’t work. The party mode is kind of fun, but janky controls can be frustrating. The ⑨ item also has various effects, but most boil down to losing control of your character who then kills themself for the next 5 seconds. The stage hazards can also be irritating, but at least they don’t meow at you incessantly. Nice music and love the story mode presentation at least. And it has netplay built in, not that I can imagine adding lag will help things.
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One more quickie for the night. The sequel to Sanae Challenge doesn’t mix up the formula too much. You’re limited to three jumps this time, have Okyuu backing you up (including an all out "Go nuclear" option for an instant game over), and the bosses of course, but the core mechanics remain pretty much identical. Still not a bad way to pass an hour or so, which is more than one can say for certain other games… Werk… but I feel like Lionheart’s gotten a bit lazy since Mystical Chain.
Well, the good is that if you liked the trial from last year, this is more of the same. The bad is that they didn’t improve much either. The mechanics are still very basic, the controls a little frustrating at times, especially with the dashes being hard to control and sometimes sending you in the completely wrong direction… along with the screen simply pulling you in directions. They also made the incomprehensible decision to force you to sit through about a 5 minute unskippable introduction that you must watch every time you load the game until you complete the first stage, at which point you must play the first stage again to unlock the second stage. That’s just… moronic. Nice music at least, although it’s a little overly electronic for my tastes. You unlock more weapons and whatnot that you can switch out of the basic slots as you progress, and like Suguri, is trying to sell itself as having some kind of overly melodramatic plot, but eh… what can you do? And I’ve still got three Touhou RPGs sitting in front of me, begging for attention. Oi.
The good. It’s very cute, Tasofro’s music is still awesome, and it is very Marioish, if such things appeal to you. There are a ton more powers, including the ‘giant’ power being a rather terrifyingly over-inflated Marisa. The bad. Tasofro stuck with the original Marisa Land’s physics engine, which means that control varies from frustrating to rage inducing. Particularly jumping. Marisa stalls at the top of her jump regardless of any other movement. God help you if you try to turn around in midair. Run speed also doesn’t scale with time, it just suddenly goes from medium speed to full after about 2 seconds, which gives the sense that you’re controlling a hippo on ice skates. It’s still a decent game, but definitely not up to Megamari or Patchcon’s level.
Somewhat disappointing. I expected Werk to at least get a full roster of bosses, but there are only four and they’re all pretty easy. If you’ve played both demos they’ve released, you’ve already played 3/8ths of the game. Yeah, there’s ‘hard’ mode too, but the patterns are exactly the same. You just don’t regen health between rounds. The dash controls are also a bit touchy, particularly when Kuroko drops her lagdozer on the screen. Misaka was also a pretty lame boss, despite the humor of her being Protoman. Oh well. I’d say that you get what you pay for, but at a third the cost of BMW, I don’t think so. English patch will be out Tuesday. Not because that’s how long it’ll take me, but because Tuesday’s a slow day and I want to finish this BBA block tonight. 3700 lines to go~
Just because I know that people are curious about the new mechanics for TH12.⑨… here you go. Chain freezing bullets, more or less as expected, but Cirno actually has a shot too. That may be the most surprising thing. Original from here, complete in its resplendent 40 frames per second. This also counts as my obligatory post announcing that I am well aware that it’s out. Now if you’ll excuse me, I was in the middle of translating… well… let’s just say that I’ll be more than happy to be done with it and hopefully never have to be involved with a two-headed goat nightmare ever again.
