Silpheed: The Lost Planet
I owned this game. I owned its shiny box. I have played it more now from a burned copy than I ever did on the real thing. I am all the worse for that experience.
There’s hardly anything to its design which is especially stark when compared to its contemporaries. You can equip different shots to the left and right of your ship. This would be cool if any but three of the shots felt useful. Late in the game, I acquired this plasma ball shot and thought, wow this is gonna be great. However, it barely does any damage and shoots out only every three seconds or so. There’s a scoring system based on how close you are to an enemy when it is destroyed. I hate it. I don’t want to memorize where ships are going to be. It’s not fun.
The level design is glacially slow. There are these large gaps of time where no enemies show up at all and you just get to watch the bland scenery. The levels also take a long time to complete and you must restart if you die. Playing this game feels a lot like waiting for your number at a busy bank. It actually awoke memories I had of when I lived and China and would wait for an hour or more so I could send money through Western Union. I remember one of those times when a white woman came into the bank and just immediately sat at a window and started talking about her vacation or whatever. Please, take a number and wait like everyone else. Anyways, Silpheed is worse because I can’t pay my student loans by playing the game.
I actually kind of liked parts of the levels near the end. There’s a neat part where your support ship that heals you midlevel gets corrupted by an alien parasite and its actually a fairly tough boss. Also, the writing inbetween levels is reminiscent of ZeroRanger’s technobabble about impossible odds and decimated capabilities. I wish I had a pic of the last screed because of how impressively verbose it was.
The next three games didn’t burn well so I’m going to be emulating them. Those games are Aqua Aqua, Timesplitters, and Ring of Red. Ring of Red actually tied with Midnight Club but I consider @meauxdal’s opinion to be an antivote. At this point, I trust them to be correct about a lot of these games.