I've been playing this game for a couple of months and I was beginning to think I'd never get the clear, but I somehow pulled it off on stream today!
(stream highlight here if you want to see me ramble to my stream chat while playing)
Gun.Smoke is one of the best games I've played this year! It's a shmup that was made by Capcom in 1985, with a big emphasis on enemies who have random movement and try to avoid your shots. They also try to get behind you, where they can shoot up at you but you can't shoot down at them. It almost feels more like a beat em up than a shmup, thanks to its focus on herding enemies with dynamic and unpredictable AI, and the bosses who summon a bunch of random regular enemies who help them out.
Thanks to it being a 1985 game, it has all sorts of weird and interesting nuances and exploits:
- You can shoot forward, left or right, and they implemented this by giving you three different attack buttons. You can press two attack buttons at the same time for additional attack angles, e.g. pressing forward+left makes you shoot halfway between forward and left, or pressing left+right makes you shoot to the left with one gun and to the right with your other gun.
- Boss 5 has one of the fastest and most unreactable projectiles I have ever seen in a shooting game, and he has a ton of snipers on the left side of the screen helping him out. Normally he would spawn a bunch of other enemies after you take out the snipers, but you can instead hide halfway up the right side of the screen where they can't reach you and awkwardly play through the entire boss fight from over there.
- Bosses 6 and 10 shoot shotgun pellets that travel halfway across the screen and disappear into a puff of dust. The puff of dust has a hitbox.
- Boss 7 has an invincible dodge roll and won't stop using it. Sometimes he will roll over and over for 10+ seconds before you can get a single hit in. It feels like fighting against a Dark Souls player.
- Boss 8 has two guns and fires directly at you, but if you perfectly line up your position you can squeeze into the small gap between his two guns and quick kill him.
- Boss 10's shots have pretty much exactly the same range as yours, and they're almost impossible to dodge. So the entire fight is about hiding outside of each others' range, baiting him into missing a shot, then running forward and hitting him once and running away before he can shoot again. An extremely silly fight.
It's a fun game! Anyway, this run was pretty rough. Gun.Smoke is a checkpoint-based game that throws a ton of extra lives at you, and the two hardest parts of the game by far are the stage 6 boss and the stage 10 boss, so you tend to spend a lot of your run repeatedly dying and respawning on those bosses. I messed up a bunch of times in this run, especially on the stage 6 boss, but I managed to keep a horse until the stage 10 boss so it all worked out in the end.
It's a difficult game even by arcade standards and it can sometimes put you in some pretty unfair situations if you get unlucky, so I'm not sure if I would recommend it to anyone else who doesn't have the exact same taste in games as me. But I love it!
