It’s a sad state of affairs that some games just don’t get the attention they deserve.  For every Pokemon or Call of Duty, there’s a dozen or more games that get overlooked.  Some of them came out at the wrong time, being buried under a pile of bigger-name titles.  Others just never got the respect they were owed.  Others still are just old and forgotten.  Here, we take a look at some of these games, introducing you to titles you may never have heard of before, or reminding you of classics you loved and probably forgot to finish.

Bangai-o Spirits

DS

Originally released August 29th 2008

If there’s one thing the DS doesn’t lack for, it’s puzzle games.  They come in all flavours and varieties, from the classics, like  crosswords and Sudoku, to more involved adventures, like Professor Layton.  On the other hand, there aren’t that many shooters on the machine.  No ports of R-Type, Darius or even a Touhou game.  Sure, we’ve got the Nanostray games, and if you’re up for importing, there’s Ketsui Death Label, a bullet-hell-style shooter, but otherwise, pickings are slim on the ground.  And if, for some tenuous reason, you’re looking for something that combines the two, there’s only one game in town: Bangai-o Spirits.

Spirits is the sequel to the original Bangai-o, released on the N64 back in 1999, and the better-known Dreamcast port two years later, which actually received a port outside Japan.  Describing the plot is… well, it’s an excersise in futility at best.  Characters regularly remark on how stupid everything is.  The ‘ending’, if you can call it that, has someone pointing out that if there wasn’t some kind of ending after going through all this, fanboys on the internet would pitch a fit.  None of it ever makes any sense, ever.  Which is probably unsurprising: let’s face it, who ever plays shooters primarily for their plot?

There’s a lot of variety on offer here. Some stages have you working out how to destroy everything as quickly as possible; in some it’s the stage itself which is literally collapsing around your ears.  Other times you have to fight a giant robot, and by ‘giant’ I mean ‘about 20-30 times the size of the player’s mech’.  No one ever said this game was subtle.  Either way, this isn’t a shooter where fast reflexes are always the key to victory.  More than one stage will force you to think carefully before you even move, let alone blow everything to hell.  And that hell-blowing will happen often, to the point where there will be so many explosions and bullets, missiles and enemies on-screen, your DS will slow down to a crawl trying to process the on-screen chaos.  Don’t think of it as bad programming, think of it as getting a literal bang for your buck.

The most interesting feature here, however, is the level designer.  The game offers practically unlimited potential to design your own level and make it as complex as you want.  Better than that, however, is the ability to share your levels, and not just between your friends.  When you pick the option to share your stages, the DS makes an unholy screech reminiscent of the noise old dial-up modems used to make.  Play that into the mic and you’ve got yourself a stage.  Now if you’re thinking to yourself ‘hey, doesn’t that mean I can just play the noises into a mic, record them and upload them somewhere’, then give yourself a cookie, since that’s exactly what they had in mind.  Repositories of levels may be hard to find, but they do exist and may be worth your while finding if you crave more action.  Though when you consider there’s about 140 different stages available here, it might be a while before you run into that wall

Bangai-o Spirits is a difficult game, in more ways than one.  It’s a game that tries its damnedest to avoid a label, it’s almost offensively weird, seemingly going out of its way to beat you over the head with how little sense the story makes and it’s just plain hard full stop.  But it’s the good kind of hard.  You’ll be stuck on a stage for hours, failing repeatedly, then, one day the clouds will part, everything will fall into place and you’ll breeze through.  Then you’ll slam headfirst into another stage and the process will begin all over again.  You don’t play Bangai-o Spirits to win, you play it to blow crap up and rack up a high score or a fast time.  And in an age were we’re expected to invest countless hours in games, and where 20+ hours of gameplay is considered ’short’, don’t we all need some of that in life these days?

Bangai-o Spirits is reasonably easy to find these days.  It crops up regularly in shops like Game and Gamestation, often in the Second Hand bin or occasionally new, so tracking down a copy shouldn’t be too hard.  If you’d rather not leave it up to fate, however, you can find it brand new on both Play.com and Amazon.co.uk for between £5.99 and £6.99.