Erst Kerf

Main Menu

First up would be Erst Kerf, which is a Shmup…now wait a minute, did I say I don’t do Shmups? Well, Erst Kerf is a Shmup, but with Dungeon Crawler elements incorporated into its gameplay. Although what really pulled me in was the rather impressive artwork of the main character. The game is rather small by today’s Doujin Game standards, which can come in gigabytes, but sometimes the smaller the better right? Not exactly in this case. But more info about that after I explain a bit about the gameplay.

Shmup + Dungeon Crawler

This game is played from a top down perspective, ala dungeon crawler style, where you go from point A to point B through a maze, ala dungeon crawler, and you control your character using both the mouse and keyboard, ala dungeon crawler. The mouse is used to change the direction your character is facing and to target the enemy and shoot, while the standard WASD keys control your character’s movement. At the end of each stage, you’ll encounter and face off a boss. You can set both your mouse buttons for alternate types of attacks, where each attack requires a different amout of magic force to use.

Now back to the bad part about the game being small. Based on the options menu of the game, it takes advantage of Pixel Shader 2.0 with Motion Blur and Light Bloom, which sounds impressive. However, the game’s size says otherwise, meaning it uses a texture resolution that is quite small by today’s standards. In other words, if you have a big, high resolution monitor, its not gonna be easy to play this game too long. Because in windowed mode, the game would be too small to play on screen, requiring you to look closer to really dodge all the danmaku while shooting your enemy. Setting it to fullscreen on the other hand, blur’s out the image too much, which can give you a headache and motion sickness especially if you are prone to these things while gaming. In other words, while this game has an interesting gameplay and nice looking graphics, the low resolution makes it hard to play for people with big screens, which is quite the norm these days.

Densou Tenshi Valforce

The second game I’ll be reviewing would be Densou Tenshi Valforce, which I’m just gonna refer to as Valforce throughout this review. Now I’m sure many of you have seen and played an arcade machine than can be played in Versus mode and each person has two joysticks to control. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, head down to your closest game center and look for the arcade machine called Virtual On, and don’t forget to bring a friend to fight against. By the way, I never played the arcade before myself, since I’m really not interested in arcade games at all.

Main Menu

Valforce is based on Virtual On, where there are 8 girls to pick from, each of them with their own abilities or mecha suits, and battle each other til one side wins. The reason why I mentioned Virtual On is because this game supports the Twin Stick system that you veteran players are all familiar with. Yes, which means I suck horribly at this game in Twin Stick mode. We have the usual Arcade mode and Practice mode here, but in addition to those, you also have a Network Mode, where if you don’t feel like sharing a screen while fighting a human opponent, can network with another computer and versus the other player.

Character Selection

Yes, this is probably the only reason I downloaded this game first out of all the C77 games, coz I spotted a blonde loli (moe?). Don’t be fooled though, although they don’t show it here, her mecha suit packs quite a punch, although the huge size of it makes it hard to maneuver.

In Game

Yeap, that’s the same loli you saw just now, facing another character in arcade mode. As you can see I lost quite a bit of HP really early in the game, and at the same time did not do any damage at all. I’m sure veteran players will feel right at home, assuming you have one of those Dual-Shock imitation controllers, or a USB converter for the PS2 Controller. Graphics are pleasant, while nothing spectacular, its quite good by doujin game standards. And yes this game supports some of the highest resolutions I’ve ever seen for a doujin game. BGM is pretty generic and repetitive, and adds little to the battle atmosphere. All-in-all, a rather fun game, if you know how to control, or practice if you don’t, especially when you go up against a friend through a network.

And that’s all for now, I might post a second one soon if I find any more games, while waiting for’em big ones.