zushi's place

(Editor's note: this is a migration of a post from late March of this year.)

Did a no death clear of Samidare's Extra Stage!

Samidare (Lit. Early Sumer Rain) is an indie top-down shooter game released in 2002 for Windows.

Around 2002, a student club in Tokyo created a variety of top-down shooter series. One was the Touhou (“Oriental”) Project, one was the Seihou (“Occidental”) Project, and the last one was Project Blank. Each project had multiple sequels, with Seihou taking inspiration from Touhou, and Project Blank taking inspiration from both.

Samidare is the first Project Blank game. It has a shield system that allows the player to absorb projectiles to boost firepower. The shield meter regenerates slowly, and most of the gameplay is centered around managing limited shield uses.

I like Samidare a lot – you can tell it's a labor of love. The gameplay and the soundtrack are both excellent, the crossovers with Touhou and Seihou are really well done, and the unlockable Extra stage showed the kind of attacks possible only with the shield system.

Most importantly, the game made me feel like that the student club really had a good time back then.

Anyways, I dug up this old game recently, and thought that I should give it a proper sendoff. The last time I played it was 13(!) years ago, and amazingly I still remembered the extra stage pretty well. Back then I was pretty happy just to be able to beat it, but the no-death challenge felt manageable this time around.

Note: as with most modern shooters, the player's hitbox is really small. In Samidare it's the red square on the player ship, and the shield meter is on the bottom left corner.

Enjoy!

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Categorized under: #gaming