Asuka & Asuka (1989)

A&A is a rather bad vertical scrolling shooter. (I picked it randomly based on screen shots to test out a vertical screen orientation (TATE) to see what it would look like on a VR headset running a virtual desktop/ projection projection mode.) This game really is a greedy quarter stealing POS. It's designed to be difficult in some unusual ways: First, you have a center section and then you have two "borders" side-sections on left and right then when you approach you suddenly veer into these left and right section of the map as they take focus and that often has enemies bullets and other surprises when doing so. Second, you have a small arc in front of you in which to fire. Your cone of fire is actually about half the width of your craft's body, and its a very large hit box. to make it even worse your shots travel about halfway down the map. There are power ups you can collect to increase your firepower but you lose your upgraded systems at death, it's almost impossible to last longer than a minute in any case because your craft moves very fish-tail-y and its very hard to dodge bullets (they have rather large hit boxes, you can even see the tell-tale outlines in a high res display)

Rare that i abandon short games (and shooters always are) but this was one of them. Each level has a different theme. One is current day, second is dinosaurs, third is some ancient mesopotamia civilization, fourth is 1942. None are terribly engaging and I definitely don't recommend this one.

On a high note, this game looked really good on my headset even though its got average graphics. I just tell windows to rotate 90 degrees as well as telling mame the same... and that's it. I didnt even have to tilt my physical monitor to do this (like usual) so that's a bonus. Playing games like this on BigScreenVR on a long imposing black monolith amidst Crab Nebula or similar is pretty gratifying.