As some of you may know, I'm quite the glutton for punishment when it comes to games, especially my beloved shmups. For some reason many human beings, myself included, find it enjoyable to get our arses handed to us by a technicolor bullet buffet, and practically line up for the experience. It's a bizarre phenomenon, and one that many game developers love to cultivate.
One example is the fairly recent Blue Wish Resurrection, a freeware remake of the original Blue Wish. The first thing any hardcore bullet hell enthusiast will notice playing it is that it is a carbon copy of DoDonPachi, with stars replaced by weird Rubik's cube things. However, it is in fact infinitely better than DDP, because of one crucial addition: one ill-begotten gameplay element in DDP was the focus firing, which started after you held the fire button for a few seconds. The problem is that focus firing slows you down and is less effective at mowing down a ludicrous quantity of enemies than your normal fire, so to actually mow down a ludicrous quantity of enemies you had to mash the fire button until your arms fell off. Blue Wish averts this problem with the inclusion of a separate fire button for using your main, mow-down-y gun, which is so very helpful.
Another problem that DDP had was that the enemy bullets were all the exact same shade of hot electric pink (with the occasional hot electric purple thrown in for variety), which not only strained the eyes after a while, it also was just plain obnoxious to look at. Blue Wish actually lets you change the color of the bullets, which is handy if you want to choose a less offensive color, although it'd be nice if someone other than ZUN could come up with bullet swarms that aren't all the same color.
Blue Wish also inherits its spiritual predecessor's legendary difficulty, and the option that automatically protects you against bullets at the cost of a bomb doesn't help in the slightest. This is one of the few games where you can die at the first level's boss and be praised for it, not because you did your best, but because you did better than everybody else. The bullets move inhumanly quickly, the supercharged attacks you get when your press fire and bomb at the same time are next to worthless, and the bullet hail never lets up, ever. And did I mention they moved inhumanly quickly?
As for the other aspects of gameplay, there's nothing too agregious to point out. The backgrounds are rather dull and depressing, which is sad given the vibrant, lively graphics DoDonPachi had. . The music is tolerable, if not high-quality, but I'm going mostly on memory here since wine stopped being able to play the music in this game a while ago.
Overall, I give Blue Wish Resurrection a 8 out of 10... if you're a fan of bullet hell shmups, that is. For the normal people, I give it a -2 out of 10, with the following advice: stay away.
I thought it was funky ^_^ Still trying to work out how to put in some legs.
