Bullet Philharmonic Orchestra - Bullet Dodging Sim

Here's a minimalist game that will keep you entertained... for a few minutes anyway. BPO is a bullet-dodging simulator for danmaku games that creates its bullet patterns according to the background music that you choose to put inside its "music" directory. It supports most of the popular sound formats (mp3, ogg, wav, mod, mid etc.) although I would recommend converting your mp3 files to wav or ogg with a program like audacity because the game doesn't seem to be too compatible with mp3.

But enough of that, on to the actual game. There are two modes to choose from. BPO is the default mode, where a group of white dots circle on top of you and spew random bullet patterns at you based on the music. The only controls you have are the directional keys. Of course, it goes without saying that the object of the game is to avoid getting hit. You control a red dot with a large green circle around it. Remember that only the red dot can be hit, the green circle is most likely for gauging the distance needed to graze a bullet. A buzz indicator on top of the screen counts how many times you've been hit. Getting buzzed means that you'd be dead in a normal shooter game. You get a bonus score via the bscore indicator if you graze bullets without getting buzzed. Then there's the self-explanatory rank indicator and frames-per-second counter. You get a summary of all your statistics after the music has finished playing.
The other mode selectable from the main menu is AL, which is a slightly harder version of BPO because the white dots now circle around you and shoot from all directions. You can choose to have the cpu play the game to see how the AI handles the bullet patterns, although it doesn't seem to be very good.

The difficulty level of the game is selectable, but even "normal" feels like playing on the insane difficulty levels of most modern doujin shooting games. The bullets come in fast and in large clusters giving your mind no room to process all the projectiles onscreen. Changing the music to something softer doesn't really help. The white dots just shoot less frequently, but the bullets still travel at the same speed.

As shown in the screenshots, BPO's graphics are very basic and it's best treated as a trainer for real shoot-em-ups rather than a full game. The best part about it is that it's a small download at about 1 mb and it's totally free. The author also provides English instructions inside the archive for those who can't read Japanese(like myself).

This game is freeware
Download Page: http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/game/se282205.html

Note: The creator's homepage seems to be down. Oh, and if you're getting buzzed a lot, try not to focus on the red dot too much. You might be falling prey to this optical illusion. Sorry about the awful screenshots. I was too lazy to edit them properly.