I've been playing Ikaruga. Developed from scratch by a team of just three people, all of which are surely ten feet tall, Treasure's electrifyingly fond farewell to Sega's Dreamcast has since put in an appearance on Nintendo's Gamecube system, with a HD tweaked dress-up currently available on Xbox Live. Ikaruga is a top-down shooter designed around an astoundingly simple conceit: the player can alter the polarity of their spaceship, swapping between invincible and vulnerable, depending on the enemies they face. With the vehicle set to black, dark bullets can be absorbed to bolster max-out screen clears, but white bullets are deadly. Set to white and the reverse is true, you can guzzle bright bullets, but black shots will whittle down your tries.
This elegant system then has a layer of wilful danger woven into it; opposite polarity shooting does double damage to enemies. Tease enough for the player to constantly want to reject relative comfort for a shot at high return peril time. Even when you do elect to play it safe, there's that constant nagging that you are only playing the game half right, that you aren't making enough of your kills. You didn't chain that! In a genre fraught with inch perfect manoeuvering, and endless Goliath showdowns, Ikaruga is a rare beast in that it makes you want to immerse yourself in quick switch superplay. It makes you want to pursue life threatening situations, rather than avoid them. Surviving just isn't enough. Clearing screens by the skin of your teeth is only half right. Unless you're ricocheting through light and dark colour sets, you're just not playing.
This is what you're aiming at:
Hiroshi Iuchi
Atsutomo Nakagawa
Yasushi Suzuki
G. rev
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