Gameplay involves using touch controls to maneuver your craft about the playfield, destroying enemies, dodging their fire, and collecting Spirit Stones and power-ups. Older devices just can’t push this scale of pixels, it seems. But all this pixellated magic didn’t come without a price Espgaluda II presently only runs on the iPhone 3GS and the iPad (with 3G iPod touch support coming soon in an update). (There’s a settings option to set the screen size, if you want to tweak performance a bit.) It’s certainly the most impressive iPhone shooter to date from a technical standpoint. Cave’s first iPhone shooter throws an x/y scrolling backdrop along with an incredible number of moving objects onscreen at once, and the whole thing just flies. The first thing I said to myself upon jumping into a game of Espgaluda II was, “finally!" I’ve long lamented the fact that the iPhone 2D scrolling shooter experience was, across the board, pretty much a slow-motion affair as compared to that of even much older consoles such as the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation.
The iPhone version seeks to bring a fast-action, arcade quality shooter experience to our favorite mobile platform.
#Dreamcast noiz2sa ps2#
A sequel to the original Japanese arcade and PS2 release, Espgaluda II is a bullet hell-style shooter that was released in 2005. In a move that should have iPhone shooter fans standing up and cheering, Cave has just thrown their hat into the iPhone gaming ring with their port of the 2005 Japanese Arcade / Xbox 360 release Espgaluda II. (Some such titles readers may be familiar with include Ikaruga (Xbox 360, Gamecube), Triggerheart Exelica (Xbox 360, PS2, Dreamcast) and Noiz2sa. It’s a prevalent genre in Japan that is far less-represented in the West. With their 1995 release of DonPachi, the company created a new, intense genre of shooter known commonly as the “manic shooter" or “bullet hell" shooter, in which the screen is almost entirely filled with enemy fire, and successfully evading said fire requires extreme control precision and skill. Founded in 1994, the Japanese gamemaker is responsible for some of the most highly acclaimed scrolling shooters to have ever appeared in an arcade. Any truly diehard arcade shooter fan will have heard of Cave.