Damn! I reallyhave to find a copy of these games. They look so cool. How had I never paid attention to them.
Taito Legends 2 [PS2] - Darius Gaiden
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 On 05/30/2014 at 03:39 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
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Hawk eats fish. Big fish.
Darius Gaiden, third in the series of Darius games for the arcade, is a 2-D side-scrolling shooter with great pixel art and demanding gameplay. The giant fishy design of the boss ships is really interesting. The game is super colorful and detailed with a note of the psychedelic in the backgrounds and the music really engaging.
How's that for a mouthful of bomb!
Your ship, The Silver Hawk (get it, you’re a hawk hunting fish), shoots missiles and bombs, has a shield, and can unleash a black hole bomb special attack that sucks enemies in and then blows them up. You can upgrade these weapons with colored power-ups that appear on the screen. You can also capture minibosses to fight for you by picking up a sphere that releases from them after they take a certain amount of damage. For some reason, I missed this feature in my first play of the game.
There are 28 levels of the game but you only play through 7 of them to get to the end. After each level you choose one of several branching paths to advance. This adds incentive to replay the game to see every level. It will take more than 4 plays though as the level choices are arranged in a sideways pyramid format that makes more levels available near the end than at the beginning. That means you need 7 plays to sample all 28 levels.
Something I really appreciated with this game was the massive explosion you get when you beat a boss. It literally lights up the whole screen obscuring everything. It gives you a real sense of the power of the ship you just destroyed. It’s very satisfying.
Darius Gaiden was also ported to PC and Sega Saturn in North America.
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