The title pretty much says it all: if you ever wanted to live the virtual life of a driver for Hakodate, Hokkaido's tram service, this game has you covered—they're endorsed & supervised by the Hakodate City tram authority, got the authentic announcer voice, implemented all the nitpicky specifics about the local traffic signal cycles, etc. The game only contains a section of the full route right now, and only a single tram, but they intend to support the game for 3~5 years with more content: not just more vehicles and fuller routes but also real-time weather and accurate uniforms and passengers real-world tourist patterns and a driver rating system and all sorts of extremely fine details that seem like they'd be completely imperceptible to anyone who doesn't actually live in Hakodate.
I don't know if the Lost Media folk have yet invaded the domain of danmaku STG but if and when they do, you can assure the first topic of discussion will be DoDonPachi Campaign Tokubetsu Arrange Version (aka "Blue Label", based on the altered title screen), a unique arrange of Cave's genre-defining 1997 arcade game DoDonPachi that was exclusively gifted to the winner of a score-attack content held to promote the Sega Saturn port. As far as anyone's aware, Cave only burned two ROMs, one for the winner and one for themselves; Cave made their build publicly playable at a live event in 2006, and the winner of the campaign PCB has made it playable on a couple of occasions and even allowed a doujin superplay circle to capture a 2-loop run for a VHS release back in 2003, but it apparently had some component issues the last time it was booted and hasn't been out to play in a long while. Last anyone checked, Cave's official stance is that they wanted the campaign arrange to remain the exclusive property of the campaign winner and explicitly did not want to port it, and who knows if either or both versions are still functional or accounted for, so there's a very real possibility that it might never be played or seen ever again.
There's more to Blue Label than just the allure of being a rare game: in addition to substantially revised enemy/star placement and boss behaviour, as well as palette changes and other graphical tweaks, it features an early version of the hyper system that would formally be introduced by DDPDOJ in 2003—it's essentially a road-test for the systems that would come to define the later games in the series, prototyped within DDP, and one can only imagine how transformative an experience it might be...
...or, if you're a complete sicko, you can attempt to painstakingly mod the original arcade ROM to implement all the Blue Label changes in exacting detail, as this one modder revealed they'd been doing a few weeks ago. Through poring over old interviews and obsessing over the old doujin superplay, they've identified and allegedly implemented a myriad of little tweaks, including relatively complex endeavours like upping the bullet limit; without access to the original game, it's impossible to truly verify just how accurately or thoroughly they might have recreated the authentic Blue Label, but they clearly did their homework.
A release for the full patch seemed to be imminent, but the dev just dropped an update declaring an indefinite pause on the release, due to "new information" that they can't disclose, but are hinting that the reasons may become public sooner rather than later, and that it's ultimately for the benefit of the community that they cease working on the mod. Immediately, two thought spring to mind: one, the hypocrites at EXⱯ are bullying them because they're doing something with DDP on their own platform, as they've done recently to MAME re: certain other Cave game, or two, M2 has something cooking with DDP and has asked them to refrain from releasing the patch; they apparently talked down the recent creator of a Dimahoo gadget mod (which basically repurposed the gadgets from the M2STG Mahou Daisakusen release), who also gave some vague but optimistic statement when they pulled their work, so there is some precedent for M2 being both aware of and willing to police even smaller EN-centric mods.
Personally, I think it's just a matter of time before Cave officially authorises some sort of public reissue of Blue Label: they put out the Guwange and Ketsui one-off arranges, which IKD apparently just kept in his desk drawer this whole time, and I can't imagine M2 hasn't earned enough goodwill to allow them to preserve this version as part of the inevitable DDP reissue. I also had my concerns about whether the modder and/or the broader emulation community would've done their due diligence in making it known that this is just a hack and not the genuine article, so a part of me is a little relieved it didn't just drop and cause a whole bunch of disinformation.
Japanese STG maniacs are discussing the commercial struggles of STG once more this weekend, with much of the conversation centred on this one comment from Sawatari of Neotro Inc., makers of the Vritra series and the recently-released NeverAwake: they assert that people like to lament the lack of interest in STG from younger generations, but those same people, who developers might expect to be useful allies, don't really check for new STGs the way one might hope they would (or they way they often say or imply they would), and I've seen a few STG-dev veterans chiming in to the effect of, "yeah, don't take people at their word when they say they want [xyz]".
Anyone who's hung around in these communities has had all these discussions ad nauseum and I think most people understand the commercial realities of why the genre's shrunken to such a tiny niche and why it won't ever recover, but I will say that, unlike a lot of people, Sawatari has put their money where their mouth is when it comes to courting new audiences and attempting to clear the hurdles that keep new STG from finding wider success—NeverAwake is a graphically-competitive game with a structure that immediately promises a sustained play time, several mechanics and general design language from contemporary action games, a conscious minimisation of the commonly-cited frustration points of most STG, and interwoven narrative elements to further hook people, without falling into the euroshmuppy/number-loot-driven traps a lot of "modern shmups" fall into, and it sucks to think they might not have found the success they hoped they would because I think NeverAwake's the most credible of all the "gateway" games in a minute and if it can't do it, I don't know what will.
(NeverAwake's available on PC & all consoles; the Switch version's actually well-optimised, if that's your preference)
I've shared my thoughts on this a zillion times and don't really feel like doing it again atm but feel free to chime in with yours, especially if this topic isn't something you find yourself contemplating every other week: what is it that you want from these games that they stopped giving you, and what would it take for a new STG to really grab your attention?
so, this argument's kicked off again
like, the exact same argument: same people, same talking points, same re-litigations of "did danmaku really kill STG" and "was the genre ever really popular" and "do people really even want big new STG in this day and age" etc etc and I'm convinced these discussions are less arguments and more holiday banter for septuagenarian chain-smokers
I see LRG's putting out cartridge repros for Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel... a few thoughts:
- they're putting out the Aero the Acro-bat spinoff before Aero?
- the dude who conceived these IP for Sunsoft USA, David Siller, has claimed for years to have bought back the rights to the games from Sunsoft, but I see they're still credited/featured on this release alongside him, so I wonder if he merely bought the IP/character rights and not the publishing/software rights for the existing games... in which case, lol
- did nobody involved give any thought whatsoever to editing that rising sun headband, jesus (even if they did, idk if Siller would be particularly accommodating; idk if their facebook's still up but when I had to check it years ago for [Project] it was full of MAGA bullshit)
Game's got slightly more to offer than the average western mascot game of the day, but not by much—it's an Amiga game that got lucky, to be sure, but you can tell the people involved really thought they were making Shinobi III or somethin'.