SNES Super Side Quest - Game # 12 - Darius Twin
1As Darius Twin is our second shoot em up game for the SNES, I can't help but find myself comparing the game with Gradius III. Even though I was not at my best health in this video; recovering from a cold or whatever, just being sick. All of my opinions within I still adhere to after watching this video over. Darius Twin is okay, but it wasn't really that special.
Being the 5th game in the franchise apparently, I would think Taito has had plenty of experience bringing the game up to par. Now, for what it does, it does well. The controls are tight, tighter than Gradius I would say. Outside of that though, the sound effects are very quiet. Which might not be so bad due to the volume of expected sound from destroying space craft. However, when the explosions are just minuscule snippets of sound that I wasn't even sure at first was occurring, I am left thinking that it needed to be looked at more. None of the music was stellar in my opinion. It wasn't bad and I know I started humming to some songs during my game play, but that was more out of habit and not my enjoyment of the songs.
Sound and Music aside, Darius Twin comes off to me as somewhat generic. It has a theme that is unique, fighting off the fishy armies of some alien faction in a space ship vessel. Overall game play wise nothing really stuck out to me as fantastically original. It had the one diagonally scrolling moment which I suppose is something that you do not often see in games. I mentioned it in the video, I am not a great player at shoot em up titles but this one is fairly easy as far as shoot em ups go. A solid beginners choice though the fact there are absolutely zero continues might intimidate some. The levels are short enough that I can see why there are no continues allotted after finishing the game. Lastly I feel like some randomness would have spiced the game up a tad. Once it was immediately recognized that I just had to emulate my past success's as nothing ever changes in this game, I lost my interest steadily. Not even the few enemies that fire projectiles fire them in different manners or directly at the player ship. Well, when they did shoot at you, most things just tried to run into you or were locked in place/set to a pattern.
Anyway, at the end of the day. It was an okay game. -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/batista_harpu