Once upon a time, the shoot-‘em-up was one of the most popular genres in gaming. In arcades, on home computers, and on consoles, mastering a frantic space blaster was a compulsory pastime.
Today, the genre is enjoying a minor renaissance. A large part of this renaissance is down to Cave, a Japanese developer currently dedicated to bringing classic 'bullet-hell' shmups to platforms like the App Store and XBLA.
These aren’t any ordinary shooting galleries. Oh no. These are madness dialled up to 11, requiring fast reflexes, perfect hand-eye coordination, and an elephantine dose of adrenaline and Red Bull.
Creepy crawliesBug Princess is a vintage (2004) Japanese arcade shooter, known as Mushihime-sama in its homeland. In keeping with Cave’s other releases, the game features glowing purple bullets, hundreds and thousands of orange crystals to harvest for points, and automatic smart bomb activation if it looks like you’re about to lose a life.
It also features excellent little power-ups in the form of satellite gun turrets that follow along with your ship, arranged in formations that you control. They can travel in a static grid (flanking both sides), or they can circle randomly around it, or they can be concentrated into a single, lethal line of laser fire.
If all this firepower sounds a bit excessive, then wait until you see the enemies that are lined up against you. Wave upon wave of crazy bug creatures are just throwing themselves at your ship, draining your precious energy bar by their sheer weight of numbers.
It’s often nigh impossible to make out what’s happening because of the speed of the action and all the neon explosion clouds that obscure your vision.
Snail trailIn start contrast with the abundant activity on the screen, the controls are laughably simple. You fire automatically, and navigate by swiping your finger along the bottom of the screen. That means you largely control the whole game with just one finger.
There are other buttons to activate bombs and switch formations, but you’ll spend so much time concentrating on dodging enemy fire that you’ll barely have time to tap them.
The design choices to make Bug Princess work on a touchscreen are understandable, but this also means that the game window is actually smaller than the screen of your device. This is lamentable, because the graphics are stunning.
In keeping with the bug theme, the enemies are all crustacean grotesques, and they are truly, skin-crawlingly ugly. The parallax scrolling by contrast is beautiful - there are three or four different backgrounds, each moving at different speeds, creating a vertiginous sense of depth.
Not everyone will have the reflexes or the patience to complete Bug Princess. But for aficionados of the genre this is going to press all the right buttons. Game development has moved apace since the glory days of the arcade shmup, but in this instance Cave’s archaeological dedication has unearthed a thing of beauty.
Bug Princess
A manic game that requires performance enhancing drugs to keep up with it. We suspect it’s an audition piece for The Last Starfighter
Bulent Yusuf
Bulent Yusuf is a ladies man, man's man, and a man about town. His endless barrage of witty anecdotes and propensity for drink makes him a big favourite on the dinner party circuit. He likes writing, he likes gaming, and with Pocket Gamer he gets to do a bit of both.