| Psyvariar 2 review |
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A craft soars into view, piloted by Yuhei. Yuhei has been chosen because he pilots a buzz-type mecha, and, in this game, buzz is beautiful. Flick the controls and the mecha begins to roll, anticipating several pink bullet clusters heading its way. Scraping past these bullets racks up buzz points, and skimming bullets while rolling will gain you even more. Manage to fill the Neutrino gauge with buzz and your mecha levels-up, granting a few scant seconds of invulnerability and speed boost. It is this pulsing, cyclical, level-up gameplay that absolutely hooks the player; you will want as many bullets on screen as you can handle, and the spoken 'level-up, level-up, level-up...' mantra will become your biorhythm.
Pink bullets are no good here, what we really want are blue bullets, which fill the Neutrino gauge at a faster rate. Whichever colour, some bullet patterns allow you to sneak through them, by placing your craft perfectly as they sail past. Getting this right and keeping the roll is tough, until you realise that your mecha can keep rolling by mashing into the screen border, for as long as a direction is held. These pink bullets are too densely packed to roll-mash the border though; Yuhei needs to wing it.
You could try getting close and pulling away, but that would leave you too far out for the second wave (not enough buzz). Instead you place your mecha at the middle distance from this first wave, and futz the controls instinctively to maintain roll, then duck in and wait it out for the first level-up. As soon as it comes, the mecha dashes into the first wave destroying them, upping your Neutrino gauge further still. Same for the second wave, and then two blue pods appear.
A green gauge is the norm, but when it approaches red in colour it fills up much more slowly, and when it approaches blue it fills much more quickly. Certain enemies affect the colour of your gauge when they are visible, so controlling which of these is on screen can have a massive impact on your level-up rate. The blue pods we've just met knock us closer to a blue Neutrino gauge, which is now cyan, and the current deluge of green and orange bullets allow Yuhei to level-up constantly. Controlling this Neutrino gauge is a valuable skill, and those most buzz-addicted can instinctively feel when the next level-up will be.
The eruption of bullets to be seen at each boss encounter is a truly awesome sight, a spinning bastard of colour. As the first boss begins to glow red, feel the gauge and level-up in his face to soak up a massive red bullet cluster. For the rest, blue bullets shower you with buzz, and beneath the end-of-level tally your lightning-crackled mecha evolves to its next form. This is arcade joy in its purest form.
Psyvariar 2 is a game of feeling, style and technique. To appreciate the best players of this game, you need to have developed these instincts and experienced these strategies yourself, to be mesmerised by the style the truly talented can express. Even then, the most inexperienced player cannot fail to succumb to the intoxicating qualities of buzz, and the excitement of a last minute, life saving level-up.
The Xbox edition of Psyvariar 2 justifies its existence with online replays, and some shiny silver packaging. Such is the quality of the Psyvariar 2 players out there using Live, you can watch a replay and it is almost as if the game plays itself. Maddeningly though, these replays can only be created for a game played in its entirety; you cannot produce replays for single Areas. This drastically reduces their usefulness, as the best way to learn this game is Area by Area. Even worse, the Area-select woefully absent from the Dreamcast edition is still woefully absent here.
Earning its purist credentials, the Xbox edition eschews a roll button that some would have wished for. This could be seen as a snub, certainly since Psyvariar Complete on the PS2 did include a roll button, but the message here is clear: use a Joystick. Despite this the pad controls are perfectly serviceable, but an arcade stick is really what is required, and what this game is about.
Technically the translation from Dreamcast to Xbox is peculiar, with some unlikely blemishes. The bare bones presentation of the Dreamcast edition somehow manages to outperform the shoddy Xbox interface. Live and Loading messages rudely appear slapped on top of whatever is beneath them, misplaced and ugly. The resizing of 2D elements causes all sorts of nasty artifact errors around fonts and diagonals. Worse still, an apparent obiwan filtering error causes a vertical line of garbage to be drawn down the left side of background images.
Getting this menu mish-mash out of the way, the game engine itself is much more polished but, sadly, not without faults. It does seem that equivalent screen settings are slightly smaller in resolution on the Xbox, which results in a marginally blurrier image. More noticeably, some larger 3D parts have visible joins, in particular the cloud textures of Area 0. This is a minor aesthetic grumble however, and in general the in-game appearance is faithful.
The Xbox edition has less slowdown than the Dreamcast version, which is actually a bad thing. A modern schmup should be developed with slowdown in mind, so that the game design takes it into account. Given the grunt of the Xbox, Skonec would have been faced with the difficult task of simulating slowdown to mimic the Dreamcast original. While there is some slowdown present, it is less pronounced, as a result the game is slightly harder than it should be, and experienced players will be thrown off by the differences.
These amateurish problems of wonky menus, inflexible replays and inaccurate slowdown do manage to take some of the shine off this wonderful game, but only a little. Which is a shame, as the complexity of the game's central mechanics (buzz, bullets, levels and colour) is utter beauty once grasped. Players new to the series will find much to love, and the replay system as it stands is certainly better than nothing. It is hard not to feel, however, that Xbox Psyvariar 2 is nothing more than a stepping-stone between the [Dreamcast] version and the subsequent [PS2] edition.
Psyvariar 2 media courtesy of Saurian Dash (right-click image and Save As to
download)
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Area 0 (10 Meg) |
Area 1 (12 Meg) |
Area 2 (19 Meg) |
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Area 3 (26 Meg) |
Area 4 (28 Meg) |
Area 5 (26 Meg) |
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Area 6a (23 Meg) NOTE: SPOILER |
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System: Microsoft Xbox
Genre: Shooter
Developer: Skonec
Publisher: Success
Players: 1
Version: Japan
Reviewed: Dec 2004
Writer: Richard Davies
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Pros:
- hugely addictive buzz system
- finely crafted game mechanics
- pure arcade joy
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Cons:
- inflexible replays
- faulty slowdown
- shabby menus
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Psyvariar 2 Video: 7.5MB
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