Bulletgba - Free Danmaku Trainer for the GBA

Overview


Bullegba is a free, downloadable danmaku trainer for the gba. (psp in my case thanks to emulators) Unlike other bullet-dodging trainers, this game simulates one long boss fight for each level. Think of an extended version of the Tohou bosses on normal and you'll get a pretty good picture of what I mean. I'd recommend playing the game on a real GBA, a DS, or a PSP if you can for maximum enjoyment.

Game Modes

The game features multiple modes of play. There are five "shooting levels" with different bullet patterns and increasing difficulty; there's a 'BulletsMorph' mode where you cannot shoot back and are forced to dodge random bullet patterns, but wherein you can't die either. "Select Barrage" allows you to practice on bullet patterns from various danmaku style games including, but not limited to Noiz2sa, Progear, Storm Caliber, Strikers and the cult-favorite, Tohou. You can also view and save replays for the bragging rights :3

Graphics

The graphics are very basic and it feels like the creators just put them there as representations and nothing more. That said, they do their job well and do not affect the gameplay one bit. You control an orange '@' symbol and get constantly assaulted with the different shaped green bullet sprites with a constantly scrolling black and gray screen background.

Sounds

The usual blip blips you'd expect from a modern 2D shooter; nothing really fancy, but they do their job just like the graphics. The music is a mix of techno and old school 8-bit nes style. The tracks are very upbeat and fit the fast-paced action of the game very well.

Homepage: http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/gba/bulletgba/

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.

Twin Seeds DX - Tohou Style Vertical Shooter

This is a cute vertical shooter with some catchy tunes and tough boss battles. This is basically danmaku with cute characters where the focus is more on stylish bullet dodging and grazing rather than shooting down your enemies. You know the drill, dodge if you can, bomb when in a pinch. In fact, You can also focus shoot to slow down your character for precision dodging and increased damage but at the cost of your score. Each stage features a 3D scrolling landscape with 2D characters and unique boss battles, each with their own special abilities. There are four levels of difficulty (been a while since I played so this might not be accurate) but all of them are actually quite hard once you reach level 4, which is as far as I can get in this game, because of the way the bullet patterns swarm in on you until you have no place left to dodge. You can continue from the level where you last died even after you exit the game.

This game is freeware, so you can download it from the author's homepage http://www.geocities.jp/pooytwo/

Also, there's another game on the same page, KagaMI, but it seems to be a beta right now.