I suppose the Cave shooter I could most closely relate it to is Progear, but even that is tenuous, as the systems are pretty different. Deathsmiles is a horizontal shooter that lets you shoot either left or right. You also have a familiar with will rotate around you based on how you move and shoot out its own shots. Tapping and holding the button will cause one of two shots to come out, and in one of those youro familiar rotates and the other the familiar is locked. Even though it's a hori there are some stages which will scroll vertically for part or all of the stage. The game has a helpful little "Enemy ->" indicator if you are firing in one direction and enemies are about to spawn in the other direction. Also, running into terrain doesn't kill you like most horis; it simply blocks your shots and your movement.D.D.D. wrote:What other Cave shooter would you compare it to? If it's unique, what would you say it's like?lisalover1 wrote:I'm still playing Death Smiles. I love that game.
The game features a life bar. If you run into an enemy you lose half a bar. If you get hit by a bullet you lose the entirty of your active bar. So if you had a full bar you lose the full, and if you had half from running into an enemy you lose the remaining half. Losing a bar is equivalent to dying in other Cave games, so you get your bomb stock refilled.
The scoring mechanic is fairly simple. Killing certain enemies produces items. These will fly out and be picked up by you when you get close enough. If you don't grab them they'll hit the ground and fracture into smaller items. If you kill an enemy with the right shot (tapping vs. holding) they'll drop bigger items. Collecting items raises your counter and once you hit 1000 a few things happen. Now all enemies drop the highest point item (only way to get it outside of killing a boss). Additionally, when you pick up an item a secondary counter gets incremented. You'll see it on the screen that when you pick up an item you get X+Y, where X is the value of the item and Y is the counter. The counter caps at 1000 if I recall. Also when you hit 1000 you can press down both attack buttons to activate your power up. This increases your shot power and at the time of activation it cancels all bullets on the screen. During this time whenever you hit an enemy with your familiar's shot it will cause a stream of the lowest point value item to be sucked in to you. So the general scoring technique is to build up to 1000, then activate power up and leech to a high bonus counter (so you avoid hitting with your main shot whenever possible). Also, when you kill enemies in this state you usually want to let their items break on the ground, as at a high bonus counter you get more value from the 3x small items than the 1x big item. You can also sometimes time it so that hwen your power up runs out (which also cancels out bullets) there is enough items on the screen to get you back up to 1000.
