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Some people make DLSite accounts to buy Stellavanity or Battle Traverse...others, well, make one for B-System. Yes, I am indeed back with some more of this game! Hehehe. I learned not too long ago that there actually was a PC port of the game from 2016 that you can buy on DLSite : https://www.dlsite.com/home/work/=/product_id/RJ175101.html
I had no idea it was a thing when running the X68k version for Slam, but it could have been a cool thing to mention or even run alongside for comparison purposes lol. Well, perhaps I was only able to see that B-System PC mention on a Discord server specifically because I ran the game for the event which made people remember the game and mention it instead of ignoring its existence if they came across it, who knows.

Of course I had to grab it (especially for that really paltry price) and play it! It is not a 1:1 copy of the X68k version so finding the differences was part of the fun.

The first thing that stands out is that the playfield is bigger, giving you more room to move around and avoid attacks. And amusingly you can see that the pretty sunset BG in the credits has not been extended or anything so it's suddenly cut on the sides haha.

With this extra real estate, the game feels less cramped, maybe less tense as a result, though be careful as there is an invisible wall on the right, 4/5ths of the way. This doesn't seem critical but since my strat for the lobster boss involves going in that right side wall, I had to change things there.

But you know what? The lobster also changed a bit. A few bosses have tweaks to their patterns, especially the earlier ones it seems like. The revenge bullet lobster attack has much more aggressive mini-lobster movement that tries to curve towards you, so my misdirection manuever is different here.

I noticed the shark boss's fireball now explodes into two rings of bullets with one much faster than the other, though I think it only happens after it lost enough health.

I think the pinecone fish boss also doesn't take damage as often, but can't say for sure.

The Octopus boss in my run here will use an attack where it goes at the top and rains bullets from the remaining tentacles it has. While this wasn't displayed in my X68k version runs, that pattern actually exists in the OG game, I just uhh...always killed the boss too early for it to use it hahaha. I had to retrospectively test the X68k version to check out this attack so this is just as new to me as it might be for you lol.

Maybe some later bosses have new attacks and stuff but I didn't pick up on them if so.

The powerbar and capsule drops are similar, however the Force Field does not give you 10 units when deploying it from a unshield state. Nope, it's just 2, same as on replenishing Force with a Force already active. You would think that means you get proper iframes post-damage as to not get destroyed super fast by lasers or whatever...but nope you can still get killed fast, though maybe not nearly as fast. I am not fully sure about the specifics and didn't die to lasers enough to really assess their Force destruction potential.

Audiovisuals have been touched up too. The BG now changes color from a boss to another which is awesome and adds to the atmosphere. The soundtrack has been remixed here, though I have to admit I like the OG OST more. The sound is stored in MIDI format so I don't know if there was supposed to be a specific soundfont to use that I don't have or if it was intended to sound like this. It's not bad, just...definitely not as good. The wave shot is no longer silent unfortunately so it gets a bit harder to enjoy the music too. You have options to cut SFX and/or music entirely but no level adjustments from what I see. Also I feel like some tracks were misplaced? For example, the final boss doesn't play its actual music even if it's there in the Sound test and game files.

While the OG game had only one difficulty level, this has Easy and Normal in the options menu. Easy doesn't have powerloss on death so you don't drop capsules when crashing anymore. I didn't check if the patterns and stuff are similar though.

The game files have sprites and other images and one of them has the title logo as well as a Game Level option in the font of the copyright notice...and it lists Normal, Hard, and Maniac?? I wanna say this is just unused text and not an indication that there are actual Hard and Maniac difficulties in this or the X68K version, but if that's an actual thing I would be curious to try them out!

Overall a cool version of the game, nothing that makes the OG obsolete but more like a close variant of that similar core.

Version 3.01