I have fond memories of playing the original Bangai-O on the Dreamcast.

It had both maniacal characters and an unfollowable “plotline” that had me laughing out loud level after level, and it had one of the most enjoyable “two-stick shooter” control mechanics ever. You could shoot in eight directions and your projectiles bounced off the walls, with a bomb blast you could detonate that grew larger and more powerful in proportion to your proximity to enemy weapons fire. It was amazing. I found myself jockeying for high scores by flying straight into danger in order to get max points. Putting your balls on the chopping block was the only way to attain those massive numbers.

The next game in the series, Bangai-O Spirits for the DS, looks to be getting pretty good reviews from critics. It sounds like it’s more puzzle-ey than the original, with smaller levels. There are a wealth of new weapons to try, 160 levels, and there’s even a level editor. Treasure (the developer) came up with a pretty ingenious scheme of sharing levels by encoding them as audio files, then playing the staticky audio back into another DS’s microphone to transfer the data. I guess it’s their way of avoiding Nintendo’s hare-brained sharing and parental controls. I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up this game, that is if I can find it anywhere. Doesn’t exactly seem like a popular title.

Here’s a cool video of it:

Well here’s an interesting one. Swarm Racer is a racing game by Lexaloffle where you race the clock to collect all of the gems on a maze-like map. Simple sounding game, but the interesting thing is that you control a whole swarm of bees, rather than a single space ship or something. The Z and X keys expand and contract your swarm, so in order to finish with Gold on each map, you have to use these skills to your advantage. I tried a few of the maps, but it seems I’m too inept to get anything better than Bronze medals. The levels look a hell of a lot like Bangai-O, one of the most fun, Japanesest shooters I’ve ever played. But here you’re racing instead of doing battle with a Robot controlled by a baby dinosaur.

This picture sums up Bangai-O’s story nicely: