Archive for Oktober 2014
Hello again, today i'll tell you about Touhou Project. I'm a little bit curious too about this one. So, i decided to dig more info about this. And again, my brain said that i had to tell the readers. Yeah, this is it.
The Touhou Project (東方Project Tōhō Purojekuto, lit. Eastern Project), also known as Toho Project or Project Shrine Maiden, is a Japanese dōjin game series focused on bullet hell shooters made by the one-man developer Team Shanghai Alice, whose sole member, known as ZUN, is responsible for all the graphics, music, and programming for the most part. The series was inducted into the Guinness World Records in October 2010 for being the "most prolific fan-made shooter series". The Touhou Project began in 1995 when Highly Responsive to Prayers was first developed by the group Amusement Makers for the Japanese NEC PC-9801 series of computers; the game was later released in November 1996. The next four Touhou games released between August 1997 and December 1998 also were released on the NEC PC-9801. The Touhou Project was inactive for the next three and half years until the first Microsoft Windows Touhou game, The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, was released in August 2002 solely by ZUN after he split from Amusement Makers and started Team Shanghai Alice. The Touhou Project became a media franchises panning a steadily increasing number of official games, in addition to commercial fan books, music, light novels, and manga.
The Touhou Project (東方Project Tōhō Purojekuto, lit. Eastern Project), also known as Toho Project or Project Shrine Maiden, is a Japanese dōjin game series focused on bullet hell shooters made by the one-man developer Team Shanghai Alice, whose sole member, known as ZUN, is responsible for all the graphics, music, and programming for the most part. The series was inducted into the Guinness World Records in October 2010 for being the "most prolific fan-made shooter series". The Touhou Project began in 1995 when Highly Responsive to Prayers was first developed by the group Amusement Makers for the Japanese NEC PC-9801 series of computers; the game was later released in November 1996. The next four Touhou games released between August 1997 and December 1998 also were released on the NEC PC-9801. The Touhou Project was inactive for the next three and half years until the first Microsoft Windows Touhou game, The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, was released in August 2002 solely by ZUN after he split from Amusement Makers and started Team Shanghai Alice. The Touhou Project became a media franchises panning a steadily increasing number of official games, in addition to commercial fan books, music, light novels, and manga.
Gameplay
In the shooting games, the player's bullet power increases on a linear scale as the player collects power-ups dropped by enemies, and eventually maxes out. The player can also collect 'point' icons to earn extra lives; the amount needed grows exponentially as the player's score rises. The player can use 'focus', the shift key by default, which slows down the player's movement, makes the collision box visible, and (generally; some characters are reversed) focuses the player's attack to make it more powerful. The graze counter, missing from Mountain of Faith and Story of Eastern Wonderland, tracks how many bullets entered the character sprite but avoided the collision box, and rewards the player with a score bonus for living on the edge.
The player can use a weapon called a 'spell card', which is similar to a 'bomb' in most other shooting games. While the player has a limited number, using one makes the user temporarily invulnerable and uses a special magical attack that generally clears the screen. Each character has two cards with different names and patterns. The player can use one during a short period after being hit by a bullet (known as the 'border between life and death') to avoid loss of a life. The amount of time the player has available to use the border is usually around 0.3 seconds. Bosses also have spell cards, but with bosses the term applies to a prolonged pattern of movements and shots that lasts until the player depletes the boss' health by a certain amount or the time runs out, not a one-shot attack.
Each individual game of the main series after Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has additional items that affect some aspect of gameplay, such as scoring or gaining extra lives/bombs. For example, Perfect Cherry Blossom has "cherry points", which are used mostly in scoring, but can grant temporary invulnerability (known as 'supernatural border'); Imperishable Night has "time points", which are essential to advancing to later stages, and also determine if the player gets to challenge a boss's 'final spell' on normal or higher difficulties; Mountain of Faith has 'faith' points, which help tabulate the score the player receives upon gathering point items and bonuses for clearing spell cards without dying or using a spell card.
Each Touhou game has four difficulty levels—easy, normal, hard, and lunatic—with each one being harder than the previous one. Regardless of difficulty choice, there are six stages in each game and each one is harder than the previous. The only exception to this is The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil on easy difficulty, which only has five stages.
In addition to the four main difficulties, there is an extra stage which is a long and difficult stage in which players must play through hordes of enemies, bullets, and bosses. In order to reach the extra stage, one must beat the game on normal difficulty or higher without the use of a continue. The only games that allow players to reach the extra stage by completing the easy difficulty are Story of Eastern Wonderland, Mystic Square, Perfect Cherry Blossom, Imperishable Night, Fairy Wars andDouble Dealing Character. In terms of difficulty, the extra stage is around the normal or above difficulty levels. In Perfect Cherry Blossom, there is also a phantasm extra stage in which the enemies that were already difficult in the extra stage have become even more challenging. Although the phantasm stage is aimed for the most experienced players, the difficulty is somewhere in between hard and lunatic. The phantasm stage is accessed by beating the extra stage and capturing at least 60 spells with any of the characters and weapon types combined.
Characters
With its focus on bishōjo characters, the Touhou series possesses a large cast compared to other shooting games. While they aren't developed nearly to the standards of a story-based game, many players love them, and even obscure stage bosses who only appear once have a fanbase. One example is Hong Meirin, affectionately known as Chūgoku (China), the stage 3 boss of The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, who won a popularity contest in Japan out of all Touhou characters.[18] Among the vast array of characters, only six named characters are male. One (Genjii) is a turtle, one is a cat (Sokrates), two (Youki Konpaku and Myouren Hijiri) are only mentioned in passing, one (Rinnosuke Morichika) is only featured in the serialized novel, and the last (Unzan) is a cloud-like entity. There is also one before all these (Shingyoku), but this character has three forms of different genders, so this character may not exactly be male.
Though each game features a collection of different characters, the main character of the games is always Reimu Hakurei, joined by Marisa Kirisame after the second game. The only games where this is not the case are Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler; Aya Shameimaru is playable on both, and Hatate Himekaidou can become playable in Double Spoiler. The same thing applies in Fairy Wars, which has Cirno as the sole playable character.
Hello there, thanks to a friend of mine that suggested me to dig more infos about visual novel. Many of you, the readers don't know about visual novel, ne? Actually, me too. I just read about this, and i thought i have to share it with you. So, here it is.
A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル bijuaru noberu) is an interactive fiction game, featuring mostly static graphics, most often using anime-style art or occasionally live-action stills (and sometimes video footage). As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels.
In Japanese terminology, a distinction is often made between visual novels proper (abbreviated NVL), which consist predominantly of narration and have very few interactive elements, and adventure games (abbreviated AVG or ADV), which may incorporate problem-solving and other types of gameplay. This distinction is normally lost outside Japan, where both NVLs and ADVs are commonly referred to as "visual novels" by international fans. Visual novels and ADVs are especially prevalent in Japan, where they made up nearly 70% of the PC game titles released in 2006.
Visual novels are rarely produced for video game consoles, but the more popular games have occasionally been ported to systems such as the Sega Saturn,Dreamcast, PlayStation Portable, or Xbox 360. The more famous visual novels are also often adapted into the light novel, manga or anime formats. The market for visual novels outside of East Asia is small, though a number of anime based on visual novels are popular among anime fans in the Western world.
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Style
The visual novel genre has evolved a style somewhat different from print novels. In general, visual novels are more likely to be narrated in the first person than the third, and to present events from the point of view of only one character. It is fairly common for the primary structural unit to be the day rather than the chapter, with formulaic awakenings and returnings to bed framing each day's events. There are of course many exceptions to these generalisations.
In the typical visual novel, the graphics comprise a set of generic backgrounds (normally just one for each location in the game), with character sprites (立ち絵 tachi-e) superimposed on these; the perspective is usually first-person, with the protagonist remaining unseen. At certain key moments in the plot, special event CG graphics are displayed instead; these are more detailed images, drawn specially for that scene rather than being composed from predefined elements, which often use more cinematic camera angles and include the protagonist. These event CGs can usually be viewed at any time once they have been "unlocked" by finding them in-game; this provides a motivation to replay the game and try making different decisions, as it is normally impossible to view all special events on a single play-through.
Up until the 1990s, the majority of visual novels utilized pixel art. This was particularly common on the NEC PC-9801format, which showcased what is considered to be some of the best pixel art in the history of video games, with a popular example being Policenauts in 1994. There have also been visual novels that use live-action stills or video footage, such as several Sound Novel games by Chunsoft. The most successful example is Machi, one of the most celebrated games in Japan, where it was voted No. 5 in a 2006 Famitsu reader poll of top 100 games of all time. The game resembled a live-action television drama, but allowing players to explore multiple character perspectives and affect the outcomes. Another successful example is 428: Fūsa Sareta Shibuya de, which received a perfect score of 40 out of 40 from Famitsu magazine.
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