"Either / or"

If I'm a sucker for anything it's, well, I'm a sucker for a great number of things, actually. The Dreamcast, shooters and Japanese wackiness I have a soft spot for in particular, however, so this port of Twinkle Star Sprites stood out to me when I was rummaging through a friend's list of games for sale a couple years back. I mean, it has a unique vs. puzzle / vertical shooter concept, lots of screaming, even more 'tarded smilies than this site has and little girls are paraded around in bikinis with their eye closed and mouths wide open, for crying out loud. Right up my alley.

So I started up the game and am immediately assailed with broken English and saccharinity. I watch the story intro, with its dumb text scrolling by almost faster than I can read, followed by a very informative how-to-play description that includes lines such as, "Attack charachtes fly at your opponentos" and "The bigger the enemy golem is the longer it." Oh, snap. I checked out the options next - which, hilariously, includes slowdown settings: Dreamcast (zero slowdown), Neo Geo (occasional slowdown) and 68000 - 10MHz (fat guy running a mile slowdown) - then decided to get down to business. More wacky story with the lead character Ran, a cute witch, and her buddy Rabicat, then it starts up and almost immediately I'm annoyed. Like a competitive puzzler, the screen is split right down the middle: I'm on the left, the computer on the right. Enemies appear on screen and I begin to blast them with a crappy shot that doesn't even feature auto-fire. Cardinal sin right there. It became incredibly taxing on my already worn-out right hand muscles (which ... I need not further elaborate on) blasting all of these cloud enemies, but they'd blow up when grouped together and send a fireball flying onto my opponent's side of the screen, which would connect and give me the victory. I leave this Forrett (sic) stage and proceed to the next, where I'm greeted with this piece of fantastic storytelling:

Ran, surfing in an extra-tight pink bikini: Woah! A lake! In a place like this. All right!

Rabicat, all bug-eyed: Yeeouch, I hate swimmingums.

Portly hamster-cat sporting a green scarf, grabbing our heroine: A WOMAN!

Ran: EEaaaAA--!

Portly hamster-cat: Hey, Rabicat! How hast you been?

Rabicat: Oh! Sir Kim, my mentor!

Ran: Ach. Pervert!

Kim: Ah, come on...It doesn't hurt anything. Well, well..It hast been a long time. Shall we have a magic lesson? I summon you forth, Wizard Kitty!!!

Well, alright then!

I continue through the stages slaughtering goofball character after goofball character with little in the way of rhyme or reason; I just blast blast blast until the CPU is finished, not even fully grasping the game's mechanics, not even needing to. I have a lifebar that depletes after making contact with the colorful (well, colorful for a '96 Neo Geo game, I should note) stage enemy, but can only die if hit by one of those fireballs - not that I ever did, as the computer would inexplicably let me win every time. I'd launch one measly fireball toward them and, despite the rest of their area being clear, they'd somehow manage to crash into it. Stupid. George W. Bush stupid, even. I didn't even realize until the second stage that I had enemy-clearing bombs and a charge shot at my disposal; not seeing a use for them, I didn't bother with them again. What really got me PMSing, though, is that I made my way through the game without having a single bullet fired in my direction. No goddamn bullets. In a shooter.

Though amused by the nonsensical story and dumb kiddy aesthetics, as well the cutesy techno-tinged soundtrack, I just can't be down with a shmup that lacks bullets, challenge and (especially) auto-fire. It was promptly shelved.

Months later, my boy Jeff pulls this off my shelf and suggests we play it; wanting to feel my $10 were justified, I shrugged and agreed. I set up a one-round match between us and cream the douche in seconds. He said he didn't understand a single thing, a limp-wristed excuse. But ... yeah, the hell if I understood much of anything either. So we continued playing, learning more about the mechanics, what triggers this and that. We got it all down in no time, and then, suddenly, I didn't see these two genres as ill-fitting anymore, but smooth and complimentative of one another; suddenly, shooting like a madman at everything as soon as it came onto my side of the screen became an asinine tactic; suddenly, we were having some seriously ****ing fierce and intense battles.

Though the stage enemies, swirling around the screen in simple patterns, are easily disposed of with a few shots or less, gunning them down right away isn't bright; waiting for a big enough group is the key, as killing one will cause an explosion, which will chain to and blow up other enemies, and the more that blow up, the more fireballs are launched to the other side of the screen. It's not quite as simple as it sounds, though. Some enemies have protective bubbles that must be burst first in order to get a good chain explosion going. And since each player only has half the screen to themselves, inviting in too many stage enemies will make things considerably tricky, especially since some of them are fairly large, and especially if that spankoff on the other side of the screen just sent over five fireballs. It'll feel claustrophobic at times trying to manage all of this in such a confined space, and this is made even worse by touching a stage enemy, as it temporarily halves the character's speed and power of their shot.

And, again, it's not as simple as all of that, either. Shooting those fireballs, or even shooting stage enemies in chain explosion-range of those enemies, will send them flying right back over, and quicker, too. Likewise, they can do the same, and should they, an extra character-specific attack will come with it. (Like Ran sending over that crackhead Rabicat to attack.) It's this clever swaying back and forth that puts a strategic edge on the game's manic twitch-dodging; sometimes it's better not to bounce back the fireballs if they're just going to come raining down in return with full force, particularly if still recovering from a recent blow. Sometimes it's better to just kill the stage enemies, which will build up the charge bar. Doing this can either be used for a souped-up charge shot, easily breaking through the waves of fireballs before going right back on the offensive, or even better, if charged up all the way - and this totally rocks my face - to send a fat boss over to their side of the screen.

It's just pure, uncut, absolute chaos. And it's all done without any real bullets, amazingly enough. The single player campaign is still awful, its dearth of enemy AI every bit as grating now as when I first experienced its stupidity. But nuts to that. Twinkle Star Sprites isn't a game to one-credit, nor will racking up an impressive score to share on a message board yield any satisfaction - it's all about fever-pitched battles between two experienced shmuppers, all about cleverly bouncing groups of fireballs back and forth and (hopefully) sending over a boss to make things even more troublesome. Or, in blunter terms, it's all about using one of the sexed-up little girls to humiliate your opponent like an Iraqi prisoner. Bam! You got served, son.

It's dumb and drab looking even for an eight-year-old Neo Geo title, sure, but this blast of pedophilia joy is highly tense and infinitely replayable, making it one of the absolute best head-to-head games I'll ever play.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/11/04