THIS MONTH I'VE MOSTLY BEEN PLAYING
Date: October 2008
Game: Ketsui Death Label (DS)
Reason: because somebody has to.

“Bullet hell” shoot-‘em-ups never get reviewed properly in the West, either in print or online, because almost nobody knows the first thing about shmup culture. It’s an area of gaming that’s turned inwards on itself almost as much as the world of the 2D fighting game, which is now almost completely impenetrable to outsiders. (Street Fighter 2 and its derivatives have now been released about eight times in the last two years, because it’s the last fighting game that the ordinary gamer could understand.)

It’s into that world that Cave/Arika have chosen to release the DS’s first bullet-hell shmup (and indeed only about its fourth shmup of any kind), and it’s not likely to get much of a welcome from anyone else. Cave’s games are at the hardest end of the hardcore spectrum (their last major home release, Mushihimesama for the PS2, is probably the most insanely extreme bullet-hell game ever – heck, even the name is almost impossible to spell), and while Ketsui is relatively restrained by their standards, this DS implementation of it is so refined and distilled that anyone but the most hate-filled, wild-eyed shooter obsessive (hello shmups.com!) is going to recoil from it in horror.

This is the only stage of the normal game that even approximates a normal shmup.