Ether Vapor

Of the many things to come out of C73 was Ether Vapor. I only just began playing it earlier this morning and found it to be a great game all things considered. The first point being that in size it’s only around 140mb… now, keep that in mind while I show you a few screen shots.

… yeah that’s what I said. The game is very nice graphics wise being done totally in 3-D and yes, you may have also noticed the view rotates. On occasion you’ll be looking at the top of your plane while flying side ways through enemies while shooting at a larger mini boss… One thing these pictures don’t show is the third mode of fire, which consists of the generic style bullets and your ‘options’ locking onto things and shooting blueish lasers at them. It’s how you deal with things that aren’t right in front of you… Or when the boss hugs the left side of the screen, like I tend to, that or the bottom. Technically there’s a ‘fourth’ mode that is actually a bonus stage and I’m not at all sure if it repeats at all but you lose control of the plane and start going fps style with a target circle on some missiles, pressing fire shoots the same blue lasers as your third firing option. The first image actually shows the second firing type which is nice for when enemies are spread out, holding it down until the small gauge on the left side of the screen fills turns it into a sort of AoE attack that I don’t particularly care for. The first shot style is more focused and when charged shoots a huge laser beam directly ahead of you which does somewhere in the range of 500 damage… No enemies around, good time to charge that up. Some larger enemies will also go into an overkill state when destroyed which basically means you shoot at them more until they explode getting more points and if I was seeing correctly dealing explosion damage to other nearby enemies… Nice to a point but they also act as shield for those guys. The game’s pretty fast paced, and the AI is pretty predictable, at least when it comes to bosses. Which is good since you can take a whopping three hits before you explode, assuming you don’t earn an extra bar of shields. I still haven’t made it past stage four though… and there’s seven altogether unless there’s extra stages after that. It’s a bit of a pace change since I’ve been mostly playing Touhou games recently. In the style of most ‘danmaku’ shooting games you are allowed to graze a bit but as far as I can tell nowhere near as much as a Touhou game and you get absolutely nothing for it. I may be wrong though as if I was doing this I was busy trying not to die instead of watching my score. Now… if you think this game looks up your alley and you’re not currently in Area Eleven? I’m sure if you look around you’ll be able to find it.