The shooter that I was referring to in my last post is a game called Gunbird, whose collected characters are in the poster above. (click the image for a bigger view) I’ve also been rolling in Gunbird 2, the glorious sequel. Both games happen to be by a Japanese arcade game developer named Psikyo, although the game was published by Capcom.

The art book I was referring to in my last post also happens to be a Psikyo art book, containing several posters and art cards from a couple of different Psikyo games, most of the others I don’t know. Still, it was fun making the connection in my head when I opened up MAME last night and scrolled through to see if I could find the game I was trying to hard to remember.

Gunbird, and Twinkle Star Sprites (the former and the latter specifically) are part of a sub-genre of top-down shoot-em-up games that some folks refer to as “cute-em-ups,” where instead of focusing on exploding monsters and bosses, you instead play adorable anime-esque characters flying in the air (in Gunbird’s and Twinkle Star Sprites’ cases specifically, you can choose to play a girl riding a broom firing magic and dropping bunnies instead of firing bullets and dropping bombs) blowing up monsters or robots to achieve a goal like “collect all the pieces of the mirror and your wish will be granted” and so on. Definitely lots of fun, and since Twinkle Star Sprites is a competitive game, the amount of button pressing will definitely lead to a sore thumb in the morning. Trust me, I know from experience.

Fun games though!