Again, sorry for lack of updates. Distracted yet again by my habit for being distracted.
But, I'm back, after trying to get this game for so long, I had downloaded and played a game called "Touhou 8: Imperishable Night".
And what a game it was.
Touhou Project is a series of bullet hell shooters, where you play a character who navigates through numerous amounts of one-shot bullets that often cloud your screen, and try not to get hit. "It's like standing out in the rain, and not getting wet."
I can't really describe this game's insane difficulty in words, so I'll let a picture do the work.
Does that look hard enough for you? Of course, my stubbornness led me to downloading this game, and to me failing the extra stage about ten times before I actually got to the first main fight.
But despite this game's difficulty, It's actually a very great game. By holding down <shift> your character "focuses", creating a white dot in the middle of your character sprite. This represents your actual hitbox, allowing you to navigate through clouds of bullets much easier. This also slows you down however, which actually caused some failures for me.
But even though your hitbox is only 4 pixels wide in radius, it's very easy for you to miscalculate, as bullets can move in different speeds, causing you to panic, and ultimately, get corned into the top right of the screen, where an enemy will pop out and kill you.
However not all Touhou games have the same focus mechanics. Embodiment of Scarlet Devil(Touhou 6) does not show your hitbox, increasing the difficulty a fair bit. However, some people recommend this installment, as the greater increase in difficulty allows the player to get used to the game's mechanics, as well as develop a greater sense of the hitbox area.
The game seems to get increasingly harder and harder as the series moves upward, as seemingly harder and harder boss fights have more punishing "spell cards"(special bullet patterns) that require you to capture the card bonus by reducing the life gauge to a certain point, or timing out. Some spell cards actually require you to time out, forcing you to survive a specified time of endless waves of red balls.
Though the Touhou games are difficult, this is what makes it quite addicting in my opinion, and the effects put into the games improve as it moves onto the more recent installments. The spell card bullet patterns are equally as beautiful(and blinding), and the background music that accompanies the game makes it much better as well.
Overall, the game is a very beautiful, hardcore game only for those who believe in perseverance, have excellent reflexes, a sharp eye, and is not afraid to hit retry again, and again.
...and again...
...and again...
...goddamn this game.
