NEXT UP ON WEIRD 360 GAMES THAT DESTROYED THEIR STUDIOS BECAUSE NO ONE BOUGHT THEM

ongoing chronicle of the complete destruction of the mid-budget game studio as a concept between the years 2005-2013

this whole period is super fascinating bc the 360/PS3 raised the graphical bar so far that development costs *exploded* and suddenly it became impossible to keep a studio alive at any sales/budget tier below Ubisoft scale

thus leading directly to a giant market hole that allowed indies on bedroom budgets to suddenly become massively profitable as Steam and XBLA tried to fill out their catalogs

...and now in 2018 "indie" somehow encompasses, like, me, making a game in my free time alone, and smallish *companies* at the scale of e.g. Hello Games or Campo Santo, which have actually retaken the mid-budget studio niche that was abandoned by all the collapses of the late 00s

anyway, the videogame

holy crap the menus are 60 FPS; you have no idea how incredible this feels after playing el shaddai lmao

Big fan of the gigantic SDTV-compatible UI text

Remember this used to be a cert requirement for early 360 games?

I dunno when they dropped SDTV legibility as a requirement but I played through the entirety of Mass Effect without ever knowing how many medkits I had bc the number was too small to be legible on my blurry 1970s CRT with an RF modulator

bring back inch-high menu text imo

something that all other game genres should learn from shmups:

plot exposition consisting of anime characters yelling nonstop melodramatic nonsense over some sort of comm system while you're in combat is a really powerful aesthetic

Oh wow this was a sufficiently early (2006) 360 exclusive that it actually displays Gamer Score within the game itself

Okay so I definitely can't get a picture with my phone camera but this game actually has anisotropic bloom? Like instead of just using gaussian blur for the bloom kernel it's got a cool six-pointed flare shape

Definitely don't know of any other games that were doing that in 2006

yo there's like a whole weapon loadout system where you can research new weapon types and when you change loadouts there's an animation of a big crane swapping out parts on your spaceship this is a good videogame

a dude got assigned to my spaceship squadron but you can tell he's going to die because he has a realistic face instead of an anime face

Is there some kind of law that every space dogfighter game needs to have this mission

There are tanker ships you can land on to restock your ammo

In this mission, one of them is aligned with a large space station such that after resupplying, it catapults you directly into a wall and you immediately explode and fail the mission

Are there any 3D dogfighters that solved the problem where 90% of the game consists of chasing after the arrow that tells you where your target is?

you end up never even looking at the actual game graphics and just focusing on the handful of UI elements that tell you what to do

Ubisoft had that ridiculous H.A.W.X game which literally spawned a giant trail of superman rings to fly through in order to get behind and enemy, and that just made it even worse

Strike Suit Zero's mech mode felt like it wanted to address the problem but didn't entirely solve it

Borrowed a capture card so hopefully can get some decent screenshots now instead of phonecam

oh hi riku

he's literally the oldest of three friends, with the other two being The Protagonist and The Girl, forced to leave at the beginning of the game for mysterious reasons and now shows up again mysteriously evil

he's also the leader of a squadron of grey and red spaceships because in addition to being literally riku he is furthermore literally star wolf

good job everyone

this came out a year after Advent Children if you were wondering what the state of the art for offline anime rendering looked like at the time

this game's a lot of fun but it's highly repetitive in exactly the same way as everything else in its genre

starting to suspect starfox-style rail shooters are just simply a better design for conveying the star warsy spaceship dogfight fantasy, bc it permits actual level design

Raddest thing I've encountered in this game:
Afterburner through cluster of enemies while holding lock-on targeter -> 180 -> itano circus

the big space battleships don't have any AA guns on their undersides which seems like something of a design oversight given that they're intended to fight spaceships, in space

legible user interface

you're supposed to shoot specific pieces off of battleships to take them down but the UI is so dense it's often literally impossible to see them through the health bars

WELL

I miss vine

remember when Final Fantasy X-2 came out and then we all spent the next several years drawing female OCs with little strings of beads in their hair

home from my day job making videogames, clocking into my second job telling you about videogames

hey wikipedia that literally means it's good

So this is neat:

Your weapon loadout is highly visible on your ship. The cutscenes are pre-rendered, so they don't reflect what you have equipped, BUT the cutscenes do actually change their loadouts as better weapons become available

like, they still went to the trouble of picking specific loadouts for different missions in the cutscenes, even though they can't necessarily reflect your actual choices

Are there any space games besides EVE that do big naval-style fleet warfare? Always seemed like something that'd be super fun as like a realtime tactics kind of game

Sylpheed has you downing entire fleets of battleships by yourself in a fighter jet, because Anime, which is also extremely awesome but in a very different sort of way

The two sub-units of the protagonist squadron are named Rhino Flight and Bird Flight

like you couldn't even think of a name of any particular bird? Just "Bird"? How come Rhino Flight gets a real animal name instead of a dumb category like "Ungulate Flight"

bird flight smh

this game is honestly doing a really good job of the like power-curve upgrade loop game design thing

you get new weapons and then feel awesome wrecking battleships that used to be hard, and then they add more stronger enemies, and then you get new weapons, etc etc

simple concept but often tricky to execute smoothly, and it's well executed here

"fast enemies with the same turning radius as the player so you just end up in infinite tail-chasing circles with each other for 45 minutes" really shouldn't be a thing in these games but man it Sure Is

Neat detail: Most levels are set in space but a few are within the atmospheres of planets. If you blow up a battleship in space the wreckage just floats there, but if you're in sky it falls towards the ground

this game is genuinely good btw

(extremely needs checkpoints though geez)

CHECKPOITNS WOULD BE NICE

After the first few levels, the focus shifts from dogfights to, like, *managing* dogfights while making torpedo runs against hordes of giant battleships

This is actually really cool bc battleships are essentially spatial puzzles and their physical arrangement forms a sort of level design

Each type has different weak points and approach angles and instant-death zones, and you have to learn them all in order to attack them

Eventually there'll be like 10 of them in the same area, each mostly defending the others' weak points, and figuring out how to pick apart this giant defensive ball of cannons is actually a pretty cool bit of videogame challenge

...except there are no checkpoints and levels are like 30 min long and you more or less HAVE to die and restart dozens of times as you work out the optimal route through a level

and then you get nuked out of nowhere like in the above video so then you ragequit and go tweet a lot

lmao this plot

Space colonies oppressed by Earth government for centuries

Space colonies start independence war

Protagonists are space cops for the Earth army

Space Cops learn Earth committed a bunch of atrocities, get sad

Colony leader: WE'RE GOING TO BLOW UP THE EARTH

The moral so far appears to be "WHAT ABOUT BOTH SIDES, but also join the army because they have cool guns"

lmaoooo they literally just did the starfox 64 ending

fly inside the enemy weapon and blow up the core and then Ghost Vision of Dead Anime Boy gives protagonist the EMOTIONAL STRENGTH to fly his spaceship away from the explosion

We blew up the colonists who were gonna blow up earth for blowing up their colony planet

Nobody learned anything at all and a nontrivial amount of genocide happened and everybody's still in the space army that murdered a planet's worth of colonists but they're v happy now

that gundam pic but it's just the robot by itself shooting two missiles labeled WAR IS BAD and WOW COOL ROBOT

IN CONCLUSION:
Project Sylpheed is good you should play it. Fun spaceship fights. Doesn't do anything particularly ambitious with its genre but it's solidly executed. Poorly-modeled anime boys being sad about space genocide. Vic Mignogna is good at screaming