Fighting for Atlantis... I guess

Prepare for awesome!

Oh, what a lovely sight.  What a great title: Crimzon Clover World Ignition.  Yes please.

Anyway, yes, for the past few days, I've been destroying my thumbs playing Crimzon Clover (thanks, Neil!).  Crimzon Clover is a vertically scrolling classic-style bullet-hell shmup.  Allow me to translate that for the non-video game players.  "Vertically scrolling" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  The game screen advances automatically from the top down, as opposed to horizontal like, say, Mario.  "Shmup" is just a portmanteau for "shoot 'em up", which means it's light on plot and focuses on shooting things.  As for "classic-style bullet-hell"... well... they say a picture is worth a thousand words:

RAWR!

That's me at the bottom there; my ship in the middle and extra shooty things on either side.  All that radioactive green is me shooting, the gold stars are points, the blue circles are bad-guy shots.  You... you can't really see any enemies in this screen shot because I'm kind of annihilating everything here, thanks to the game's Double Break mechanic.

See, in this game, when you blow up enough bad guys, you fill a gauge and unlock Break Mode.  Break mode doubles your scoring, and increases your damage (it does other stuff, but those are the important ones).  If you fill the gauge twice, you can Double Break.  Double Break increases the damage even more, doubles (again!) your scoring, and makes everything faster.  It also makes the game glorious.  I mean, unleashing a Double Break is crazy fun because you just blast things to pieces.  It kind of ruins other shmups.  Of course, it's not all wiping the walls with baddies:

The bosses are worse.

Yeah.  That's not a boss in the above picture, it's the first of three or four "medium enemies" in that level.  Granted, it's in the final level, but you can get a screen like this against non-boss enemies.  You really can't see it, but in the middle of that huge mess, over to the right, is the tank-thing that's spewing out 99% of that hot death there.  Let's just say it's a good thing there's unlimited continues...

Get used to seeing this.

So that's Crimzon Clover in all it's glory.  Sure, there's a plot, technically ("...you're launched from a sub because ATLANTIS"), but it's really all about the scrolling mayhem.  I could get into its arcade history and so forth and so on, but that's really beside the point, and anyone who cares can hit up Wikipedia (and they probably have it already).  However, thanks to its arcade roots, this feels like a throwback to the 80s heyday of the shmup.  It's not trying to be poetic or really do much of anything new (although the Break mechanic is really awesome), it just wants to be a great game you can just lean back and enjoy.  There's something great about utterly demolishing endless waves of weird ships, plants, and tanks.

You could do a lot worse for $10.