Jet Buster

A shmup for furries. Kind of a blend of megadrive and Touhou going on, has very 90s Toaplan energy in its presentation. I paid like two dollars for this game on sale which yeah idk I'd say I got two dollars worth of joy out of it. that sounds a bit backhanded. i don't mean it that way.

Compared to the developer's previous games, the shift to a "cute-em-up" style is a bit surprising, if half-hearted: the art for characters, endings and wallpapers is mediocre, and in-game the theme is limited to enemy pilots falling down cartoonishly, the bosses, and lame dialogues between them and the selected character. The main scoring mechanic revolves around coins and medals. The former are released by pretty much anything that can be destroyed, and if hit by the character's secondary fire, they turn into the latter. Collecting coins raises the level of medals, giving them more value when converted from coins. Several parts of levels are clearly designed as places to accumulate coins and consequently get better medals. Medals collected in any run become currency for the shop, used to unlock more characters and game modes. The balancing act between coins and medals is quite fun and rewarding. Coins are also used as credits, as an increasing number of them is required every time you decide to continue after losing all lives instead of giving up. It, however, becomes moot quickly, as it's very easy to farm enough medals to unlock unlimited continues, which is much cheaper t…

I just picked up a bunch of shmups in the summer sale, and dabbled in ~30 minutes of each just to test them out. So far this is my favorite. The music and pixel art make a great first impression, and the gameplay is very responsive. Movement speed feels perfect, and there's a really fun medalling system that also provides metaprogression currency to unlock new playable characters. It's obvious that Jet Buster was made with a lot of care and attention to detail. I was honestly hesitant at first due to the heavy focus on anthro characters, but they're mostly just on the game's optional borders and on the character select screen, so don't let them push you away from trying a genuinely great game if you're on the fence. I almost skipped on it, and I'm glad I gave it a try.

This game is a very unfun SHMUP to play. I have 1CCs on many games in the genre but in this one I could barely compel myself to play long enough just to clear the first level. Whatever is going on here does not work for me, whether that's hitbox jank or bad enemy placement or boss design or whatever. Only having one character to play with from the start also doesn't help, and despite the sort of fun combination of aesthetic and sound design this feels overall like a wholly unpolished experience and not one worth spending any real time on.

Top tier arcade style shmup! feels like a modern classic. I just wish there was a boss select but besides that u gotta check this game out if u like shoot em ups.

This game has some cute character art (especially the new pictures by "Alex"--they should add an extra pic to the bonus store drawn by that artist), and some amusing character banter (as text--a bit hard to read before it disappears though). There is a twist to the game design where the typical bonus coins you collect raise a multiplier value; then if you shoot at more coins with a special gun, they'll turn into "medals" which you collect as currency. You have to do this at the same time as fighting/dodging enemies. You can spend medals to get additional continues, and to purchase new characters and bonuses. One of the bonuses is "infinite continues", which strangely ends up defeating half the purpose of the medals. The game plays like a typical "bullet hell", but its main problem is that the enemy bullets are gigantic, and fill the screen in ways that are nearly impossible to dodge. Also, they move at a speed that exceeds normal human reaction speed. And even if you set a different color for the tiny square that is your hitbox, it's so hard to see while moving that avoiding enemy shots becomes a lot of guesswork, dumb luck, and infinite continues. This pretty much defeats …