I love spaceship shooters, and I love Japanese weirdness.  Otomedius Excellent is a shoot-em-up released exclusively for the Xbox 360 by Konami in 2011.  As far as Japanese weirdness goes, the opening video is an untranslated J-Pop song, the characters are all buxom girls, and the special edition version of the game comes with a pillow case.  Still though, there has to be a good game underneath it all, and I’m afraid that Otomedius Excellent could have been much better.

Since I opted for the $10 bargain bin version of the game, the pillowcase was not included.

This is a horizontally side scrolling spaceship shooter where you control one of the buxom girls on a quest to um… defeat the enemy I suppose.  The manual gives a vague description of the story, and even the story mode in the game didn’t give much of a story as it was mostly just trash talking between you, and the boss characters.  The game play is not nearly as crazy as something like Deathsmiles, or GigaWing, but there is still plenty to shoot at.  The main problem I have with the game is how pathetically weak all of the weapons are.  You start off with a ship capable of only having two shots at a time on screen, which is the same fire power as the Galaga ship from 1981.  Naturally you can pick up powerups, but you need to pick up a lot of them to have a chance at most enemies.  One thing that is neat is that you can choose which weapon powers you want before you start the game.  The bad thing about this is that you don’t have access to all of the weapons when you first start the game.  Like an RPG, your character gains experience points each time you play.  If you keep playing over and over, you will eventually get access to stronger weapons.  Some people may like this RPG aspect of the game, but I hate it.  I think that shoot-em-ups should be based on skill rather than powering up your character.  The same goes for online first person shooters like Call of Duty.  At least in games like Gran Turismo, your little Ford Fiesta races against similarly slow cars.  In Otomedius Excellent your starting ship needs a billion shots to take out stronger enemies.  The bosses can be especially frustrating, and you won’t even get the satisfaction of defeating them if you take too long, as they will leave the screen if you don’t defeat them within a certain time.  The bosses are all a bit too similar to each other as well.  I played this game enough to get my character more powered up, and the game became a bit more fun, but my success had to do with better weapons rather than my skill improving.

The graphics look pretty good, but there were a couple of levels where the enemy shots got lost in the backgrounds.  The soundtrack has a few catchy tunes, and overall it doesn’t offend.  There is a lot of chatter going on when you are playing the game, and it’s all in Japanese, and it helps to add to the mayhem.  There is a three player co-op mode which probably makes the game more fun, but I wasn’t able to try it out.  If you like shoot-em-ups, and if you like to play a game over and over to power up your characters, then you will love this game.  For me though, I like to play these arcade type games to see how well *I* can do, and not have to rely on levelling up my characters.  This is the only thing that brings down an otherwise fun game.

Raiden Fighters Aces for the Xbox 360 is a compilation of three shoot-em-ups released in the arcades between 1996 to 1998.  The games are Raiden Fighters, Raiden Fighters 2, and Raiden Fighters Jet.  The games are two dimensional shoot-em-ups, and they are very similar to each other in gameplay, and graphical style.

I don’t know why, but Raiden Fighters Aces just sounds weird when I say it.

After selecting your aircraft, you set off to destroy other aircraft, tanks, or anything else that you think is a threat.  In other words, everything.  These games all play about as straight forward as can be for a shoot-em-up.  One button shoots, and another drops a smart bomb which destroys everything on screen.  You can collect power ups after defeating enemies in order to increase your shot power.  The action isn’t quite as insane as some of today’s shoot-em-ups, but there is no shortage of action.  It may hit that “just right” amount of action for some people.

Most good shoot-em-ups have something that sets them apart from the pack, and in this case it’s the huge number of aircraft you get to chose from.  There are over 30 different aircraft to chose from spread over the three games.  Each one moves at a different speed, and each one has different weapons.  This increases the replayability, as you’ll want to try them all to see which is your favourite.  There are many options to chose from before you start your game.  You can change the game’s difficulty, change the order in which you play through the stages, play only the boss battles, or play with a time limit.  You can also choose to have unlimited continues, or pretend that you’re poor, and limit yourself to just a few credits.  The games also keep track of your highest scores, and thankfully don’t even have to log into Xbox Live to view them.  Hooray!

Even with the dreadful Xbox 360 controller’s digital pad, this game controls very well.  Maybe that is because my controller has been broken in, or maybe because games like this get my adrenaline going and force me to press on the digital pad harder than normal.  Who knows really.  There are lots of nice sounding explosions that you’ll hear constantly, and the music is very fast techno music that suits the game well, and gets your heart pumping.  About the only flaw in this game is the low resolution graphics, and narrow screen width.  I know these are ports of mid to late 90’s arcade games, but sometimes the graphics make it a bit tough to see enemies or bullets.  It surely doesn’t ruin the game however, and if you like shoot-em-ups then you’re going to get three great ones in this compilation.