I recently got a japanese Xbox 360 so naturally I got carried away playing around with it and forgot about Ether Vapor for a while, like I figured would happen. I plan to return to it sooner or later, I’m just not satisfied enough with the 1miss. The little break might even do me some good.

I bought the new console to play the games I had already acquired in anticipation of the event: Raiden IV, Raiden Fighters Aces and Death Smiles. After playing each maybe an hour I’ll probably leave Raiden IV on the shelf. It’s just not that interesting, the graphics are so shiny it’s distracting and the bullet wobble is really annoying. I see little reason to play it when the games in the Aces collection have none of those problems. RF1 has caught my attention the most so far, maybe I’ll start working on that at some point. Death Smiles seems pretty fun too, I prefer horis anyway and the scoring system doesn’t feel overly gimmicky which usually turns me off them.

While those games were the main reason I bought the system, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time playing XBLA titles. Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Mega Man 9, Omega Five, GripShift…all excellent games. I 1CCed Omega Five just today, but it was with the very overpowered Sensei character, so it’s not much of an accomplishment. I do like character-based shmups like this (Section Z, Final Mission, etc) so it’s something I’d like to work on more but sometimes I find the bullets hard to see and get hit without knowing why, so I’m not sure if I want to spend time on a game that has such technical issues. I’m not sure if I’m just getting old or something, but the most often I fail to see bullets is in high-res polygonal games like Omega Five and Raiden IV. But I am playing them on a SD CRT TV, which might be a reason to this.