[NEO-GEO] Project Neon - No-Death Clear - 2,971,610 Pts

Описание: Cool new homebrew Neo-Geo arcade-like shmup from Fullset that came out last year.
Inspired by Toaplan and Cave, it's one of the only Neo-Geo games to be fully developed for a vertical screen orientation. The only other one being Neo XYX.
The dev was very kind to lend me a copy of the game along with an entire Neo-Geo system in order to play it for the video, so mad props really.

The game can be played in both vertical and horizontal mode but is primarily designed for vertical. Apparently the Neo-Geo can't actually rotate graphics, so in horizontal mode EVERYTHING is horizontal (except for some HUD elements). You basically need a rotated monitor for this.

For weapons you have a straight shot and a short-range, cross-shaped subshot, which gives you some range around you as well as incentivize pointblanking for extra damage.

Certain enemies drop rings that hold three powerups, of which you can choose one, these are:
Main shot level up (max level 5).
Subshot level up (max level 5).
A bomb.
Just like Cho-Ren-Sha 64K, you can also move inside the ring to collect all three at once, however doing this is a lot harder in this game. The rings don't always move straight down, they have weird acceleration and trying to stay inside them with non-normalized diagonals is a bit clunky.

The game has an enemy chaining system that increases your combo by killing enemies and is maintained by shooting enemies.
What's really unique here is that your shot gets more powerful at a combo of 10 kills and above, I don't think I've ever really seen that before. Imagine DOJ but you hyper after a certain number of Hits. Not sure how long you can extend these but I don't think you can full-chain any stages at least, there seem to be a lot of long gaps between enemies. Stage 4 seems like the most likely to have big long chains.

Score seems to mostly come from chains, the Cho-Ren-Sha rings and stage-end bonuses.
Some enemies drop coins with a static value of 420 points but are otherwise not huge.
Bosses can probably be milked a little.

Deaths are quite punishing in the sense that you lose a lot of power, and things tend to not die at low power.
Resources are quite stingy as well, with only 4 lives total. You can technically get a bomb from every powerup ring, but you can only hold 3 at a time. Dying always resets you back to 1 bomb too, so you can't exactly resource spam the bosses.
Stage 4 is especially punishing in that there are literally zero powerup rings for some reason, so if you die there or go in with low power you're kinda screwed(?)
Besides that, the game is not super difficult to clear if you can maintain a good powerup momentum. The patterns themselves are not too hard either except for the TLB.

I say Neo-Geo but this kinda gives me Amiga vibes for some reason.

Apparently the colors on my system were kinda borked and everything was way too bright.
I tried to fix it a little in post but it's still not perfect.

The game might get some more updates in the future.
I do feel a little bit of input lag so maybe that can be fixed later.

For more technical details check out this great review from Basement Brothers:
   • Project Neon - New Neo Geo Shooter Out Now...  

Game site:
https://fullset.io/

00:00 - Intro
02:03 - Stage 1
05:35 - Stage 2
09:01 - Stage 3
12:39 - Stage 4
16:35 - Stage 5
22:23 - Ending & Credits

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