"A great concept, BUT..................................................."

Imagine a game that combines the frantic arcade shooting of an SNK shmup, with Puzzle Bobble's (Bust-A-Move in the states)sllit-screen two-player madness. Twinkle Star Sprites tries hard to do something different, but it just doesn't work out. The shooter portion of the game is average at best. You can shoot, charge and bomb. Shooting raises your combo bar, which makes your charge shots more powerful. Bomb coins can be collected for, get this, bombs! What seperates this from the myriad of 2D shooters headed to the Dreamcast (one can wish, can't he?) is the fact that all the enemies that you take down go flying onto your opponent's side of the screen, giving them even more to worry about. Also, your Combo bar can determine what kind of enemies you send over; uyou can even send a boss there way! Well, it sounds good, but what keeps it from perfection? Let's take a gander, shall we?

Graphics-5

This is a direct port of a Neo Geo arcade game, so it still has the odd color-schemes and the 24-bit graphics. The charactr art is made up of a very strange group of witches and crap. Each of these characters has a story, but you'll be so turned off by the incoherent story line and the meaningless dialogeu, you won't care. An odd feature you have control over is slowdown. That's right, you can choose from three levels of slowdown: no slowdown, some slowdown and, my favorite, ****ing unplayable!

Audio-4

It's an arcade port. Those three words alone should warrant that you make sure that mute button works before you order the game. It is, in my experience that arcade games don't need descent music and sound effects, because you can't hear it above the racket of a local arcade. When the game comes home though, the music remains unchanged and you'll soon be envying the def, for a little while anyway.

Gameplay-7


I gave a gameplay summary above so I will not do so again. Just know that the shooter gamepley is near-non existent. There are no powerups, no shot upgrades, nothing! All you do is move your ship around the screen, shooting at the colored creatures that come down in groups in unpredictable movements and slowly leaving. I don't want wave after wave of monster. I want particle dodging, laser-charging, huge boss blasting adrenaline soaked action in my shooters, and in this department, TTS does not deliver. The puzzle aspects work well enough, as your always trying to throw something your opponent's way to get rid of their last heart. In my opinion, though, I think the gamer should have more control over what exactle he's dropping on their side. One attack for each level on the Combo meter isn't enough.

Ganji-Protection-NONE

Well, that may be a bit misleading. You see, you can choose which language to work with in TTS, including Japanese, Spansih and the default English. The problem is is that the Englsih language translation is so hilariously bad, you may still not know how to play after the instructional demo.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/27/00, Updated 07/27/00