Moot_Geeza wrote:84. Sagaia - Genesis (55mins)
85. Darius Gaiden - Arcade (30mins)
Two absolute scrubman playthroughs of well regarded horiscroll shumps, inspired by some chat that broke out on here last week. I had Sagaia - aka Darius II - as a kid. My dad bought the MD off (of) a colleague and it came with a diverse smattering of games, but I was never any good at it, or the genre. I borrowed Hellfire once: blimey. Even in 1992 with only a handful of games to choose from I think reaching level 3 of Sagaia was my PB. I tended to prefer the screen push types (Sub-Terrania etc.) to the forced scrolling ones, a preference that's mostly stuck. I've dabbled with far more shmups in recent years than I usually do, but I'm still a beginner when it comes to taming them. Which is probably why I still think Sagaia is outrageously difficult even with save states. It's smooth, it controls well and I'd have the stage one music in contention for the absolute best shmup tune ever award, but it's so crushingly brutal that at least 60% of my playthrough was a war of attrition. And that's powered up, mind - if you rollsafe with save scumming and keep your shield you don't reappear with a pea-shooter because it's basically a TAS perfect run. For those in the know I believe this is considered a good game and a solid port, but it's so far out of my comfort zone I wouldn't have the slightest interest in learning the latter stages properly. Mrs. Moot summed it up for me when she glanced at the screen: 'I hate these games, they never seem fair'. Of course she's wrong, but only for the small minority of players with the drive to learn why - in layman's terms she's bang on. There were sections I found hard to navigate unscathed even with flagrant abuse of rewinds.
So I moved on to Darius Gaiden afterwards, and thankfully the whole thing felt infinitely more doable thanks to the get out of jail bomb drop, which wasn't an option in the earlier game. You only get three per credit, but the ability to survive a no-win situation is a bit of a game changer for anyone who doesn't know that layouts like the back of their hand. I've got no idea when shmups started to incorporate such niceties, but the invincibility windows offered by bombs feel like a pretty big deal to me (as they did in Crisis Wing, Sophstar etc). I still had to hammer the save states, obviously, but the bomb helped me to pretend I was in charge.
The Outrun style branching paths are great and seem to be a Darius staple (which means there are tons of stages in all of them), as is the WARNING A HUGE BATTLESHIP APPROACHES boss stuff. The names of the guardians are suitably wild too - I think one of them was called Fatty Glutton. Gaiden in particular is clearly a legit game, but not being skilled at the genre coupled with having zero desire to learn the layouts means it's a bit wasted on me. Off the top of my head I can't actually think of any forced horizontal scrolling shmups that I genuinely love - there almost certainly aren't any in my top 100.
There's no point in me adding scores really, they're proper 'it's not you it's me' games. Gaiden > Sagaia, but something like Resogun is miles better than both for my tastes.
Here's an energetic rendition of the tune I mentioned earlier:
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