The last couple years, the Shmup Club has chosen a high profile game as our January title, and it would serve as both the introduction for the year, as well as a scoring competition throughout the year. However, we haven't had great participation beyond January with those, and in particular, keeping up the leaderboard throughout the year proved to be something I couldn't keep up with successfully. So instead of doing that, we're trying something new. We'll still have a high profile game we want to cover, but instead, it will be called the "Focus Shot" game. Each month, we hope to have people playing the game alongside the regular monthly selection, but with a focus on learning the game more specifically, and not just going for a 1CC, but also in more completely exploring all the game has to offer, whether that is more modes, scoring techniques, other ships/characters, or other secrets and content. For the podcast, we'll talk about the "Focus Shot" game each month in a short segment, and then we'll have a special episode at the end of the year to wrap up discussion about the game, and cover it in greater detail, like we do for each regular monthly game. We hope this approach will encourage greater participation throughout the year, and give us a lot more ability to really go in-depth with a game.
With that in mind, we're covering the Cave classic
Mushihimesama as our 2022 "Focus Shot" game. With its recent digital release on the Nintendo Switch, and forthcoming physical pressing from Limited Run Games, in addition to the long available Steam release,
Mushihimesama has quickly become much more well-known over the last year than it has been for some time, particularly outside the shmup fan base. This "bullet hell" style shoot-em-up takes ideas Cave had implemented in previous games and refines them, as well as paring down the game play experience a bit to a tighter approach, eschewing the 2-loop system many previous games had, and sticking to a really well designed, core set of stages that scale in difficulty in a way that allows players to scale with it as they learn.
Mushihimesama also sees Cave exploring new territory at the time, shifting focus from military-style shooters to the much more colorful and vibrant world of insects and nature scenes. Beyond the original arcade version, there have been other iterations on the formula, with the later 1.5 version, which changes enough to make it a different experience, as well as the Arrange mode, and of course, multiple difficulty levels for each mode that further add replayability. And there's also a Novice mode to help bring players into the world who might be less familiar with this style of shooting game, and help players learn some fundamentals. Join the RF Generation Shmup Club during 2022 as we play
Mushihimesama throughout the year!
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