Star Fighter - 1cc - Autofire On
Personal Difficulty: 11/50
Early 90s Korean jank shmup. Has a mechanic where you can upgrade your ship by allowing it to be caputred and then retrieving it, like in Galaga. This game feels both really hard and really easy at the same time, a lot of the patterns are just wtf to dodge but it's lenient enough with resources that flailing around and just crawling through the game is a surprisingly viable strategy.
All the things wrong with this game:
-This game has one stage theme and one boss theme, these just repeat for the whole game.
-This game has one of the worst bombs I've ever seen in a shmup, while it can be used defensively it greatly slows your speed and doesn't let you shoot while it's active, and only clears bullets in a small radius around you. This often puts you in a situation where you'll be flooded with enemies when the bomb ends and will have to use another.
-Iframes tend to run out immediately after the action that gives them ends, respawning is the one exception to this.
-Being captured reverts you to the default weapon and bottom speed and removes your options, regardless of how upgraded you were before.
-If you somehow kill the enemy that's capturing you (which happens more often than you'd expect) it still reverts you to default weapon with bottom power/speed with no benefit to you.
-One of the graphics in the intro (not shown in the video) is very obviously ripped from Bosconian, I would be shocked if this is the only stolen asset.
-This game has 8 weapons, and all of them manage to feel weak.
-The item that changes your weapon blocks your shot, so if it's revealed in a bad place it can make some sections way harder.
-The item also skips over whatever weapon you currently have, so you can't just collect it to clear it off the screen
-The item ALSO is worth 500 points, so technically optimal scoring is to switch your weapon as often as possible.
-A few sections just feel really repetitive and way too long (see: end of Stage 5)
-This game's difficulty is horribly unbalanced, I feel like Stage 2 and 6 contributed more to its difficulty than the rest of the game combined.
-The orange ball enemies that shoot a fast 5-way spread just feel unfair, and in situations where you have to micro its pattern it's basically impossible to keep your options.
-The life counter goes straight from 8 to F for some reason?