Deathsmiles
Zen frustration
Developer CAVE IntErACtIVE publisher DEgICA price tBA AvAilAble At StEAm deathsmiles.caveshmups.com
Deathsmiles is what you get when you combine J-Pop, Gothic Lolita magic girls and one of the greatest ever shmup developers. It’s a colourful, crazy, highly addictive bullet hell nightmare featuring five colourful little magic girls each capable of blasting the hell out of the monstrous enemies with their impressive looking spells. Broken into four difficulty levels –1, 2, 3 and 999 – Deathsmiles allows players to chart a non-linear course to the final destination, a showdown with an evil wizard who is not only responsible for all the monsters flooding the world, but is also looking to tear open a portal to the other side letting even greater threats through.
First released in 2007, Deathsmiles looks older, more reminiscent of a 90s arcade game or a NeoGeo console shooter. That’s not to say it’s ugly. The design of the game is beautiful, with big, colourful sprites and more explosions and bullets than you can poke a stick at. That said, even when played full screen the game still shows up windowed, with the actual gameplay window surrounded by a flat pixel texture. Whether this was done as a shortcut to negate the need to raise resolutions or whether it is an intentional stylistic choice the end result is the same – it makes the game feel a little cramped, as though not using the full screen is constraining the character rather than keeping it in aspect.
Like other bullet hell games, the hitbox of each character is much smaller than the actual rather large character sprite. Only the glowing heart or each of the magic girls can be damaged (oh Japan, never change),
The PC version of the game is a port of the limited edition Mega Black Label arcade machine
making it much easier to navigate through the torrents of bullets that fill the screen in higher difficulties. The PC version of the game is a port of the limited edition Mega Black Label arcade machine, the only previous version of Deathsmiles to feature the 999 difficulty. It really is for masochists. Each enemy is capable of spitting as many bullets as the bosses on lower difficulties, making each second of the game a frantic fight for survival. Thanks to endless continues, this leads to what I’ve taken to calling a feeling of Zen frustration. You reach a point of anger and frustration that everything melts away and you become solely focused on the task of not letting a cutesy game beat you. Your fingers know when to fire left or right and when to drop a screen clearing bomb. You start to instinctively pixel perfect dodge between the seemingly solid walls of bullets. You start to rack up points.
Well, at least you do that for about 30 seconds. Then you die, let out some kind of noise that inform everyone around you that you are not happy, then start again. Deathsmiles really shows the essence of bullet hell gameplay. It highlights the elation that comes when you dodge what looks to be unavoidable and kill what seems to be unkillable. It also shows you that you are not good at doing those things. It’s a love/hate thing. TAVISH FORREST