[FC/NES] - OVER OBJ - No-Death Clear - 1,458,020 Pts
215Turn on captions for some extra text comments during the video.
Over OBJ is a recent 2023 homebrew developed for the NES/Famicom that seeks to really push the hardware to its limits when it comes to making a more modern bullet hell shmup on it.
It's pretty unique and not something you've ever really seen on the NES/Famicom before. It's also pretty remarkable that they managed to get this working on a system that, historically, has a lot of problems with having many things be on screen at once.
Of course because this is hyper focused on bullet count and most resources are going to that, some compromises had to be made.
The backgrounds are mostly empty, your own shots are very underwhelming, there aren't many mechanics and there aren't many special effects or set pieces, basically limiting the gameplay to its pure basics.
You have a shot and bombs and that's it.
There is actually a shot limit, so you're incentivized to go higher up the screen to do more damage.
Bombs also don't actually do any damage, they just clear the screen of bullets for a while and give you some i-frames.
You get an extra life and bomb every 100k points you achieve.
The maximum amount of bombs you can hold at a time is three, but you can increase this number by dying.
You get showered by quite a few resources, so clearing isn't really that bad. The low starting bomb count is pretty tricky for something like a no-miss though.
There are three ways to gain score in this:
- Destroying enemies
- Stage-end bonuses
- Pointblanking
You get a score bonus after clearing a stage depending on how many lives and bombs you used.
For stage 1 this is a total of 10k for lives and 10k for bombs, for stage 2 this is a total of 20k for lives and 20k for bombs, and so on until stage 6 which is 60k total for each.
During a stage for every life lost this bonus is decreased by 20k, and for every bomb used it's decreased by 10k.
Pointblanking gives more tick-points than shooting something from afar.
Game really needs a focus button or some way to change your speed settings.
Dodging these kinds of patterns is kinda annoying and feels like you're doing a Touhou no-focus challenge.
The sprite flicker can also get really obscene in parts, really impacting the bullet visibility. Most notably the stage 4 boss final, where sometimes the fast purple bullets just turn almost invisible.
Most modern NES emulators like Mesen have a setting that can reduce sprite flicker to almost nothing, but you obviously can't use this on hardware and probably isn't the ~intended~ way to play this?
Could also maybe use a Hard mode.
Still all around a neat game that I'm glad exists, and is easily one of the best shmups on the system. It reminds me a bit of Atomic Punker, a similar game that tried to hyper-optimize the PC-98 for bullet hell shmups. Though I think Recca is still the more superior Famicom/NES shmup?
This game and Recca kinda try to do the same thing but achieve it in different ways, so it's interesting to compare them. Recca definitely goes for more spectacle over raw bullet count and has obviously a much higher pace.
The game can be bought over at:
https://www.beep-shop.com/ec/products/detail/DF-3--35721
(Though they're currently sold out)
The person that made this also made more Famicom/NES homebrews.
There is a racing game as well as an adventure game, and he has even made a whole 30 minute anime out of the adventure game all by himself (except music and voices), just in general a really crazy and talented person.
Definitely check them out: https://twitter.com/ls_create
00:00 - Intro
00:46 - Stage 1
03:12 - Stage 2
05:36 - Stage 3
09:10 - Stage 4
13:01 - Stage 5
16:52 - Stage 6
20:53 - Ending & Credits
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