Note: This is one of the posts I made on my long-dormant Vox blog. I’m bringing everything over here in preparation for dumping Vox.

Bullet Hell Shmups: I like classic arcade games. Growing up in Orangeville, I wasn’t often exposed to really great arcade games. We had one arcade in the mall; it was filthy and stank of smoke. Mum wouldn’t let us go in there, so I’d hover by the door watching the attract mode on the frantic shoot-em-ups. The rare time I’d get a quarter or two, I wouldn’t want to waste it on a game like this, when I knew it would be gone in seconds. The games in the arcade were always set to a higher-than-normal difficulty, and a quarter would get you two guys, not the normal three.

It was this lack of early gaming that hooked me on MAME, the “Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator” when I discovered it. Finally, I could dump virtual quarter after quarter into these games, and not go broke. I played emulated games on my Mac very heavily all through university. After school the interest dropped way off, and I ended up burning all my emulated games to DVD and clearing them off my computer.

My interest was renewed recently, however, when I saw that some real gems of the bullet hell genre had been successfully added to the list of games MAME could run. I was most excited about Radiant Silvergun, one of the best video games of all time, of any genre. RSG is likely the hardest game you’ll ever face (watch this video of some of the gameplay, and note the engrish catch-phrase “BE ATTITUDE FOR GAINS!“; I’ve never made it past the second boss. It came out in my last year of university, and there was a machine over at University of Waterloo. I would play while waiting for friends.

It turns out that Radiant Silvergun isn’t quite playable, but some other classics are: DonPachi, DoDonPachi, Gigawing, and best of all? Mars Matrix. Mars Matrix is one of those games where you don’t necessarily dodge bullets, you deal with them. Which is good, since even with your ships tiny hitbox (the area where it counts if you take a bullet), there’s just too much going on to dodge.

I’ve found a profound pleasure in busting out these straight forward, twitch-and-shoot games from days of yore. Something happens when you hit 30, and you just don’t seem to be able to find those big chunks of gaming time. Every so often I’ll be able to finish a longer PC or console game in maybe two, three weeks. But generally I need to find something I can do for 10 minutes while I wait for some other task to finish. Its very satisfying to start up one of these games, get seriously pummelled for $10 worth of quarters, see pink and blue dots when you close your eyes, all in a shorter period of time than shows up in your daytimer.