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Sparrow's Shoot the Bullet (PC)
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| [June 11, 2006 11:51:00 AM]
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Haven't had much time to play this recently. 5-1, Meiling's standard attack, is easily one of the more difficult missions in the first half of the game. I just managed to clear it for the second time (first time was on the office pc).
The interesting thing here is that you can exploit a bug in her AI: whenever you hug the edges of the stage, it messes with her movement and targeting. However, this time I tried it without exploiting the bug, and it was actually easier. See, she also has a spread attack which is quite a bit easier to dodge if you aren't restricting yourself to hugging the edge.
There's a moral somewhere in this, but I'm not sure what it is exactly...
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| [April 25, 2006 04:58:11 AM]
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Cleared 8-6 during my lunch break a couple days ago. This is the first Level 8 pattern I've cleared, although I have most of Level 9 in the bag already. Primarily 8-6 is an endurance card; it doesn't require extreme skill or clever tricks, but consistent skill under sustained pressure.
I need just 8 more cleared patterns to unlock the final level... The rest of L8 is pretty tricky, but I can probably go back and finish off Level 5 and 7 - I have one pattern missing from each of those. I may have to attempt level 10, but I've tried all of those before and they all seem pretty darn deadly.
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| [April 19, 2006 12:20:35 PM]
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I just re-installed this due to getting a new PC and started playing through it again.
Shoot the Bullet is yet another independent game by the prolific entity known variously as ZUN or "Team Shanghai Alice", and is the 9.5th (heh) game in the Touhou/Shrine Maiden series. Since Perfect Cherry Blossom (the 7th game) there have been 4 releases:
TH7.5 - Immaterial and Missing Power
TH8 - Imperishable Night
TH9 - Phantasmagoria of Flower View
TH9.5 - Shoot the Bullet
Fun titles, eh? Anyway, the integer-numbered games are the more straightforward shooters (although TH9 was slightly off the beaten path), and the ".5" games, of which there have been two so far, are generally considered spin-offs. TH7.5 was a fighting game of the Marvel vs. Capcom persuasion, developed in collaboration with another indie studio.
...Which brings us neatly back to Shoot the Bullet (StB for short). StB is a brilliantly clever and innovative take on the concept of a "shooting game", in that your shooting is done with a camera.
No, this isn't Fatal Frame. At first blush, in fact, it looks similar to your garden-variety shooter, until you realise that you can't actually shoot (in the usual gaming sense of the word). Instead, pressing the fire button causes a rectangular viewfinder to appear over the game screen, whereupon you can then release it and "take a picture". (Never mind that you sometimes get your own character in the picture. Suspension of disbelief is wonderful.)
So what sort of game effect does picture-taking have? Well, StB isn't structured like a traditional shooting game; instead, it's divided into about a hundred (give or take a few) different mini-challenges, each of which is a specific "boss attack" or series thereof. In other words, when you start a challenge, a boss shows up and begins a particular attack pattern, which will usually last throughout the challenge and will often intensify as time passes. Your job is to take a set number of photos of the boss - the number depends on the challenge. Getting hit at all, or letting the time run out (there's a 2-3 minute timer for each challenge) will immediately cause you to fail.
Sounds easy? Well, it isn't. For one thing, your camera is an antiquated model, so after every shot, you need to rewind the film (which is automatic and takes roughly 10 seconds) before taking another. You can go into a "quick-rewind" mode where your film rewinds much more rapidly, but in this mode your movement speed is incredibly slow. For another, the viewfinder usually appears over your character. If the boss isn't in the viewfinder, you could try moving your character closer before shooting - but that will often expose you to severe danger. The alternative is to use the "zoom mode" - that is, to hold down the shoot button. This has the effect of slowing down time and allows you to use the movement keys to move the viewfinder - of course, your character is immobile in this state. The catch is that the viewfinder begins rapidly shrinking when you're in zoom mode, and when it reaches a specified minimum size, the shutter automatically triggers, whether or not you managed to get the boss in the picture. And then, if you failed, you have to rewind and try again - while under fire.
The bright spot here is that even if you don't get the boss in the picture, any bullets you capture in the viewfinder when you shoot (hence the title) will disappear, allowing you to use the camera like a "smart bomb" to get out of tight spots.
Another element which deserves mention is the scoring system. This gives bonuses for a whole bunch of things, including (1) making sure the subject is centred in the picture, (2) managing to get yourself in the picture as close to the subject as possible, (3) taking a picture while flying dangerously close to a bunch of bullets, (4) taking a picture at "just the right time" (the game gives you an indicator of when that time is), and so on. However, the main scoring element is "how many bullets you get in the picture", which obviously encourages risky behaviour.
The game is positively brilliant, even though I kind of suck at it. The mini-challenge model is great for quick breaks, and the patterns are all different and mostly very interesting to beat, with a good mix of "memorization" patterns and "skill" ones. There are enough easy patterns to keep the game interesting for a beginner, too.
Currently I've managed to unlock most of the levels on my office PC (don't tell my boss!), except for the last set. On my home PC, I just started, and managed to clear the first 3 sets of levels.
The game's available from the usual sources - www.paletweb.com and www.himeyashop.com . Unfortunately, no demo is available. Understanding of Japanese is helpful but not required.
Summary: If you only buy one Japanese indie game EVER, this is probably a pretty good pick.
Oh, and some guy with a lot more time/skill than me posted some videos of the more difficult bits in the game on Daily Motion:
http://www.dailymotion.com/Dracil
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Sparrow's Shoot the Bullet (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 19 April, 2006
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