Magical Amber (まじあん): Tobi Tsukihime alternate game mode, complete "making" and strategy guide, "Hell" replay

(tags game, shmup, Windows, doujin, side-scroll, yoko, replay-data, programming, book)

Have you played Tobi Tsukihime (とびつきひめ: TTh)? If not I urge you to get over your side-scrolling shmup aversion, and buy a copy. This is a high quality doujin shmup, a frenetic hyper visual overload of sprites and light with cuteness, with some relation to the commercial ecchi Windows shmup Tobi D+vine (とびでばいん). Did mention that the music rocks? Only a couple million times.

01Step recently released Magical Amber (まじあん), a new take on the TTh shmup game. The same page has the 25MB demo, so check it out. It's not a totally new game, because it reuses the backgrounds, enemy sprites, animations, music and sound effects. The story cut scenes are gone. But it replaces your shooting pattern, enemy shooting patterns, and scoring mechanism. It feels new. The tempo isn't changed however. MA tempts you with point hoarding at the same places as TTh. No experience with TTh is necessary, though.

Did you like that orb/spinning cat thing that you could shoot to capture areas and destroy enemies in TTh? It's gone in MA. It was pretty interesting and visually appealing but they experimented with a new game type here, that slow-ship + blue penetrating laser, which is a meme from the Raiden series and countless other shmup games.

Do you like Mushihime-sama style disappearing bullets? Do you like purple enemy bullets raining down on you like danmaku curtain fire? Do you like the sound of leveling up, leveling up to get temporary invisibility, hit indicators flashing in like Psyvariar's Buzz count? Do you like the miasma of "+100" sprites overloading the screen? MA fulfills this and more.

MA is part of 01Step's Comic Market 71 offering, which is the Tobi Tsukihime Reader (とびつきひめ 読書), a strategy guide and breakdown book of TTh. The whole set was about 2000 yen by Tora No Ana proxy. MA is on the CD-ROM, which also includes that Hell Replay video that I wanted back at Comic Market 70.

That TTh Reader book is amazing. Its a virtual love fest for all aspects of the game. This is the first time I've ever seen a fully detailed breakdown of the TTh scoring, sprites and sprite animation, story, music, and programming. I mean, what other shmup book explains the event loop programming constructs necessary for DirectX and Windows gaming?

In his blog entry for 2007-01-05, "mu", the main programmer, explains there wasn't many examples of a book on the general programming market that explains game making from start to finish, so this is the reason he wrote the TTh Reader. He's hoping that this could start a trend within doujin shmup makers of releasing strategy guides, with a nod to French-Bread (フランスパン) (famous for Bike Banditz).

Illustrations by Naoki Honda (本田直樹) also adorn the book, but there's nothing new. I thought Honda wasn't well known, but it turns out his ecchi illustrations adorn the covers of the monthly adult manga magazine Comic Momohime (COMIC桃姫) ever since its inception on 2000! I wanna see more non-adult stuff from him.

There's nothing new about the sound effect and music department manned by Masashi ”MSS" Yano (矢野雅士), pity. Most of the detail was already covered by the Tobi Tsukihime Soundtrack paper insert.

This is the prefect send off for this doujin game. I highly recommend this purchase. Any game creator enthusiast from the programmer viewpoint should read into this book. It was sad that at my local Tora no Ana the books weren't moving but then again, that was the first day. "Mu" doesn't have any plans to create any reprints, so get your copy while they're still there.