The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ether Vapour Remaster

Man, I just don't know. What makes for a good shmup anyway? I want to say visibility and slick design make for a good shmup, but maybe I'm totally wrong or I'm just super awful. Well no, I am super awful at shmups, but they (I think?) mostly fall into the domain of really twitchy "challenge" games like torture platformers where I am completely not the correct audience anymore.

This is actually the fourth shmup I've played in recent memory - I played Jamestown in 2011 and liked it, but I'm hesitant to spend a long time getting good at twitchy games when I have so many other, more rewarding games to play. Then I tried Syber Arcade, which I reviewed as "good but short", and after it Satazius. After hitting the play button for Satazius my headphones begin uttering a sound I would describe as the sonic hybrid of a cat hissing and a wood chipper being run through a blender. You can assemble and re-assemble that sentence however you'd prefer, but basically it sounds super insanely awful and I just didn't play that.

I'll come right out and say that I liked Syber Arcade more than I liked this game by a pretty big margin. Ether Vapour is visually just not very distinct, which can really get irritating when the screen is covered in crap, and relies much less on tactics and much more on rote memorization. I do enjoy the fact you have three different weapons, rather than an upgrade system, but the lack of an upgrade system always takes away from shmups for me. That's the child in me, sure, but the gradius system of ridiculous power ups as you can momentum in the game is just thrillingto me. The other thing is that the game gives you very little wiggle room in bursts of fire, which is very difficult to deal with and maybe I'm just shitty but it kinda feels like I'm supposed to know better from replaying the game.

On top of that, enemies can be on other planes along any axis, meaning you can't hit them and it can be really difficult to quickly discern between a group that is, and a group that is not. Syder Arcade did this as well, but far less often and the art style there was more distinct. It just feels kind of messy and gross - enemies can be off your plane and firing at you, but you can't hit them back? It just strikes me as innately unfun. The one weapon allows you to 'lock on' and fire homing missiles, but this doesn't really have any intelligence in its targeting - You can shoot at enemies you can't fire on with other weapons, but it's only useful in boss fights since with multiple targets they seem to just shoot whatever you could hit normally anyway. The weapon also has lag in targeting and firing, which I just don't get. It seems to do less damage so it doesn't feel like it would be universally useful since enemies flood the screen if you don't kill them at a brisk pace.

The game allows you to turn on hit boxes, which is a great feature and it's amazing how tiny your hit box is compared to how big your ship's graphic is, but it isn't much help when you're avoiding enemy ships ramming into you. The effective area of the screen comes off as very, very small but also not very distinct. That lovely feeling of dodging and weaving between life threatening but very clear objects? Pretty rare, though it did crop up a little in the city level.

nice headband

Anyway, like I said, the graphics are a bit muddy and washed out, with plain backgrounds. The city level is just a blur of buildings going by. The buildings are grey. The enemy ships? Grey. The end result: Blargh, god I miss sprites. Watch someone play Blazing Star or any of the other Neo Geo shmups made when dinosaurs walked the Earth and yeesh. I know it's not all about graphics but this game looks like it could have been released before Shadow of the Beast, let alone a Neo Geo game. The audio is fine, the music the pretty usual fare. It does seem to stutter a little, and my system while being a year old and featuring a 460GTX is not at all below par. I don't really know if I'm just absolutely awful at shmups or if Ether Vapour is just entirely for another audience, but I didn't really care overly for the game. I'd settle into the groove for a bit, but it's hard to keep up with grey on grey on mushy grey then I'd die. There's also super anime as fuck story pages between levels, but I doubt it's going to do anything more than 'mysterious hero is mysterious, pew pew, bullets go into enemy FACE' so I turned that right off.

Frankly, maybe I'm just terrible at shmups, but what do I look back on playing other shmups recently as fun whereas this is just a chore?

Ether Vapour Remaster is the third game in a bundle I bought off Groupees for $2.25 that has cards. At this stage, I've actually profited on the exchange, which soothes the fact Satazius and Yatagarasu didn't really work. Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos is such a sweet name for a game, though I don't think I'll ever get around to that one.