![]() But a game that repeatedly ended with the Game Over screen during stage two would only have frustrated normal players into giving up, rather than inspiring them to improve. Starting the player with unlimited continues, as in SNK's Metal Slug home ports, would have reduced the game to a half hour experience, during which the player would have spent a thousand lives while skipping past exploration of any of the deep, skillful mechanics. It was a simple yet clever way of tempering the token-thirsty coin-op experience for the home market without entirely sacrificing the hardcore appeal. Although the game started the player with limited continues, every hour of play unlocked an extra credit for all future playthroughs, until, eventually, "free play" went into effect. The game was additionally made approachable by the inclusion of a fair continue system that encouraged repeated play almost like level-grinding. As an arcade shooter, Ikaruga was necessarily difficult, with screen-flooding waves of tiny bullets quite the norm, but it was actually less overwhelming than many other twitch shooters, since players at least had the chance to absorb half of the shots fired at them. Finally, on higher difficulty levels, defeated enemies would explode into bullets of their color as a last gasp attack, making for some hairy situations, especially in two-player co-op, when enemies of both colors would be attacking and dying all over the screen at a brisk pace. ![]() Regardless of your initial strategy, matters rapidly became more complicated as black and white enemies attacked together, and bosses could fire both colors alternately or at the same time. If you had the nerve, the most dangerous approach was actually the "Bullet Eater" strategy, a pacifistic option that involved going through the game without shooting at all, but rather scrolling passively through stages and waiting for bosses to automatically depart after set time limits. Players were consequently encouraged to balance the cautious approach of invulnerability against an enemy of the same color, versus the greater risk/reward of increased attack power when fighting with the opposite color. The player's own attacks, meanwhile, were twice as effective against enemies of the opposite color. The player was impervious to bullets of the same color and, in fact, could even absorb them to power up a homing laser-the player's only other weapon besides regular bullets-that functioned vitally like the screen-clearing bombs found in most shoot 'em ups. While the two offered no unique abilities, the color system added a new dimension to traditional bullet-dodging gameplay, because all enemy crafts and their bullets also came in only black and white. The player's ship could switch between black and white modes. With the shift to polygons, traditional 2-D action games were becoming an increasingly hard sell, so it was a delightful surprise when Atari decided to pick up Ikaruga, the spiritual successor to Radiant Silvergun, for release in North America and Europe in 2003, giving Nintendo GameCube owners the chance to experience, not only the best game Atari ever published, but possibly the greatest work of interactive art ever produced.īorrowing from another previous Treasure title, the side-scrolling platform shooter Silhouette Mirage, Ikaruga's gameplay centered around the polarity mechanic. ![]() Their first attempt at the arcade vertical shooter, Radiant Silvergun, quickly came to be regarded among hardcore shoot 'em up fans as the pinnacle of the genre, but the game never saw release outside Japan. Treasure, a small studio founded by former Konami employees who had worked on the Contra series, made a name for itself as a master developer of fast-paced 2-D action games in that same vein, such as Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier. But if ever there was a game that merited a "frothing demand," Treasure's 2001 arcade shoot 'em up was it. "Our frothing demand for this game increases." Stretching prominently across the front cover of Atari's North American release of Ikaruga, thus read the legendarily awful quote from David F.
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