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A bombastic, catchy orchestral score makes every battle, every shot, every dodge, an epic moment. Bosses galore, as many in one stage as other shooters fit into a whole game all cleverly designed polygon behemoths made of various beautifully animated segments rotating and connecting and firing in 10 different ways and colours. But while you're doing so the game throws searing colours at you, and backgrounds which aren't static, but rotating, tilting, changing your perspective so that your ship appears to zoom into and out of the screen. Radiant Silvergun has the genius design, all of the action beautifully choreographed so a player can learn the game quickly yet take years to master. Tetris is a piece of genius game design, but aurally or visually it doesn't stun the senses, even though we might agree the melody was catchy and the aesthetic as simple as the game required. It blasts all of our senses and afterwards we're left wowed. This is where a game is not merely good in one area, but excels in all areas. Radiant Silvergun exhibits my theory of Total Gaming.
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DEMONSTAR SECRET MISSIONS 1 PLAYTHROUGH UPGRADE
It was a lot more arcadey: there were fewer levels overall and no option to save, nor an upgrade shop, instead you had to grab various powerups during the game, which in some ways added the tiniest bit of depth to the gameplay. For the last stage you'd be switching between planets and moon bases which each tended to have their own theme.ĭemonStar SM1 and 2 had prerendered graphics which looked really pretty, though the backgrounds tended to be a lot sparser and there was less enemy variety. Then you'd move on to greener, built up areas where enemies' paint themes were more uniform, giving the impression that you were now fighting an organized military. In Raptor I also liked the progression of the stages where you started out in what looked like some sort of desert/barren part of the globe with ramshackle buildings and no clear color scheme amongst enemies, so it looked like you were fighting a haphazard group of mercenaries. Never a dull moment in the background, each level was unique and always had different landscapes and buildings scrolling by, many of which you could destroy.
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For all of those what drew me in most of all was the level of detail put into the levels, Raptor especially so. I liked most of Mountain King Studios' games, in particular Raptor: Call of the Shadows, and DemonStar Secret Missions 1 and 2.
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