Dancing Madly
Wartech: Senko no Ronde is easily the most impressive game I've played in a long while. Imagine you were playing a shooter. Y'know, Gradius or R-Type or The Guardian Legend or some shit, and dodging bullets and stuff...but instead of fighting an army of tiny ships you were fighting one-on-one with another player.
Holy shit.
Senko no Ronde has been compared to Psychic Force and Virtual On, in that they all feature one on one combat focusing on ranged weapons (and therefore dodging) rather than traditional close-range combat. But here is the difference: Senko no Ronde is in the style of a "bullet hell" shooter, where bullets are all-fucking-over-the-place. It is intense.
So here is the set-up: You've got eight characters, which seems small, right? But each character has two "catridges" that change their stats and their bullet patterns. It is remarkably similar to the Slash and Bust styles that the older Samurai Shodown games (...ok, so just III and IV, really) used to use. Each character has their main attack, a sub-weapon, and a dodge. On top of that there is a shield button and various barrage techniques, which require super meter and could be considered the "special moves" of the game. Note that when in-close, long-range attacks become melee. There is also an overdrive system, which upon activation burns off a player's health for stronger attacks.
And it gets crazier: At the beginning of a match, each player has two "B.O.S.S." stocks. Yeah, they turn you into a motherfucking boss with crazy bullet patterns to match. Even cooler is that the opponent can actually destroy your B.O.S.S. shell to put you back into normal mode prematurely.
When you are brought down to zero health you enter "vanish mode" where your hitbox becomes visible and you can only be hit once more before death. Even more importanly, though, if you use a B.O.S.S. stock you'll enter FINAL BOSS mode, where you are stronger than normal and have accsess to a final attack. However, if you are destroyed in Final Boss mode it is round over.
Even low-level matches basically turn into an exercise in when to use boss mode. If you try to wait until you are in vanish mode, the other player could just go into boss mode right before you hit the vanish state and finish you off easily. Shit is ridic.
So here is the thing, then: I'm pretty sure I did a terrible job of explaining this game, and I suck pretty badly at playing it. But it is such an awesome idea I have to keep at it, and if I ever get any of you in a room with a 360 I'm shoving my copy in so you can at least play it once.