This month is shaping up to be a month of shooting games for me. I’m hopefully getting Espgaluda II sometime this week (tomorrow preferably), and at the end of the month I’m looking at snatching up Sin and Punishment: Sky Successor (okay, so that’s a rail shooter and not an stg) and Deathsmiles.

I got to try DS and Esp2 at Fanime, a week and a half ago, though me playing Esp2 on any serious level dates back to Sakura-Con two months ago. I tried vanilla Esp2, then went on to try other modes like Arrange and Black Label. Esp2 Black Label is even more hilarious than Mushihime-sama Futari Black Label; any enemy killed will now cancel bullets, and killing enemies in Kakusei/Awakening mode will cause them to explode into more bullets (that can be canceled out as well). I also really want to obtain the iPhone port despite getting the 360 port anyway; I tried that at Fanime too on my friend’s iPad and it beats the snot out of Ketsui Death Label as far as a portable Cave game goes. Sadly, I don’t intend to get an iPhone any time in the coming years, and I’m a bit strapped for cash to be getting an iPad (which would be a little un-portable anyway) or a new iPod Touch; my current one is a first-gen 8 GB model. Since it’s almost maxed out, perhaps that could be an excuse to get a new one.

Also at Fanime, I stopped by Aksys’s booth to play DeathSmiles, which I had already preordered. It shows that Cave can definitely do horizontal just as well as vertical, and that I should probably try Progear no Arashi sometime. I haven’t played such a fantastic sidescroller since Gradius Gaiden; bidirectional firing, colorful graphics, freedom to choose how hard or easy you want the game to be and what stages to pick, and a scoring system with a good learning curve (I couldn’t break the default high score) contribute to my anticipation of getting my own copy. Unfortuantely, on the 3rd day of Fanime (of 4), the stick for it was removed because apparently people were messing around with the stick. As someone who refuses to taint the beauty of Cave shooters with a stock 360 pad, that meant no DeathSmiles at all for me for the remainder of the con.

And now, I wait. Hopefully I come home from the arcade tomorrow to a package from Play-Asia with my name on it. And if that happens…I just might be up until 6 AM. I love having summer vacation this early.