More Shooting Upward: Blue Revolver

I’ve continued to lean into my shmup era lately, focusing mostly on Touhou 10 and Blue Revolver: Double Action (a brand new remaster of an acclaimed 2016 game).

I started playing Blue Revolver some time after making that last post, and it is a proper jewel of a game. Actually: it’s the very next shmup I would recommend to a newcomer after ZeroRanger. ZR taught me why I should care about shmups, and BR:DA is in the process of teaching me how to care about shmups.

I learned about this game from an enthusiastic video about it from a youtuber called Electric Underground. I thought his analysis was onto something really interesting; the nutshell version goes something like:

• The complex act of balancing scoring systems against survival is where most of the depth emerges in a shoot-and-dodge game. To serious shmup genre heads, the real game begins when you start playing for score.
• BUT: scoring mechanics and the scoring metagame are traditionally opaque, and hard to grasp without an external community.
• Therefore, the next design frontier for shmups is to integrate the metagame with the core game — transparently expose the full depths of the scoring systems, and build on-ramps to score-play through all the rest of the systems, so that new players find themselves beginning to play for score long before they even get competent at playing for survival. Shmups may never be appropriate for anyone but sickos, but that’s how to recruit and train new sickos (e.g. yours truly).

( Extensive mechanical exegesis, you know you love it )