Post-Mortem Dreamcast Shooters

Chaos Field is the first shooter from a company called Milestone, which was formed by former members of Compile. It's also substantially different from most of the other shooters on the system - despite being overhead, the game still runs in the standard horizontal 4:3 resolution, and only allows for a single player.

Chaos Field feels like it desperately wants to be a Treasure game. The entire game is literally a boss rush - you kill one boss, the screen fades, then you fight another. The rest of the game is a patchwork of elements from other shooters. In addition to your main weapon, each of the three selectable ships has a sword, which can be used to absorb most enemy bullets. There are also two secondary weapons, which are unique to each craft - one is a homing missile style weapon, and the other is a defensive-type shield. Use of the secondary attacks is limited by a power bar, but can easily be regenerated by picking up the little red crystals that appear whenever a section of an enemy is destroyed. If the power bar is full, the enemy drops white crystals, which greatly add to your score. Destroying foes with one of the secondary weapons starts a combo, and the longer you keep it going without running out of firepower, the higher your score.

Similar to Cave's ESPgaluda, there are two "fields", or parallel dimensions. By default, you fly in the Order Field, but with a press of a button, the screen tints red and you burst into the Chaos Field. Your weapons are a lot more powerful in the Chaos Field, but the enemy's attacks are even more aggressive. You can also target bullets in the Chaos Field, allowing for huge combo possibilities.

To an extent, it's easy to see that this game was created by ex-Compile folks - many of the bosses feature a huge number of turrets, a common aspect featured in older games like Zanac or The Guardian Legend. The problem is that they're usually spinning and firing, all at once, and there's rarely an instance when the screen isn't cluttered with bullets - I'm all for bullet hell shooters, but sometimes this just feels like too much. I think the idea is that you're supposed to carve out safe spots with the sword, but it's clunky to use, and you can't use it at the same time as your weapons. So you're either busy swatting things just to stay alive, or trying to mount an attack amidst a constant flood of mayhem. Even on the easiest setting, the game is obnoxiously difficult in the Order Field, and just grows to impossible lengths in the Chaos Field.

Chaos Field has some really cool design aesthetics, especially the ship designs, but from a technical standpoint, it's only slightly ahead of a PSOne game. There's also an extraordinary about of slowdown when you target bullets. The hardcore trance music is pretty catchy though.

While there's a lot of neat ideas at work, it seems like Chaos Field just takes the "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" approach to the gameplay. It's a bit sloppy and frustrating, It's a good first effort for the company, just to see all of the ideas at work, but it's not that spectacular a game.

The original Dreamcast release is pretty barebones. It was later released on the PlayStation 2 and GameCube under the title Chaos Field Expanded, the latter of which came to America. In addition to the original arcade version, there's also an "Original" mode which adds small interludes of regular enemies between some of the bosses. Although it doesn't drastically improve the game, it does help it flow a bit better, so it's not just boss after boss after boss. Chaos Field is included in Ultimate Shooting Collectin released for the Wii.

Trizeal was made by a small company named Triangle Service, whose founder had previously worked on the mediocre XII Stag. Before the release of the Dreamcast version, the creator posted a message on the official website begging people to buy his game. The gist of the plead was that they sure don't make shooters like they used to, and his small team of three people had put a lot of sweat and tears into Trizeal, all on an extremely small budget. The slogan (and subtitle of the PS2 port) is "Shooting Love".

And when the creator said "old school", he wasn't kidding. Trizeal plays like any number of 16-bit overhead shooters (Raiden, the Star Soldier spinoffs, innumerable others) and emulates the 2D graphical style with 3D polygons. From a technical standpoint, it's pretty unimpressive (and has a fair bit of load times and slowdown), and the music is equally as unremarkable as the visuals. But the low production quality is halfway excusable if you're one to believe its low-budget origins.

Your ship has three different weapons - a standard machine gun, a standard set of homing missiles, and a standard laser. Each are streghtened individually, although two types can be fired simultaneously with enough power-ups. It's free of gimmicks (and some would say style), but they accomplished what they were aiming for. And that's pretty much all there is to Trizeal. After the Dreamcast version, it was ported to the Playstation 2, which actually has more slowdown.

After experimenting with Chaos Field, Milestone went for a slightly more traditional game with Radirgy, which is short for "Radio Allergy" (the title is sometimes spelled "Rajirugi" or "Radilgy"). However, it ditches the futuristic look of most other shooters of favor of cel-shaded visuals, filled with cute anime characters and brightly colored landscapes. It even injects a bit more personality into the genre by featuring several characters that send you e-mails while you're playing. The pilot is the blue haired chick, Shizuru Kamigusa, while your aid, the purple haired girl with glasses, is named Tadayo Aita.

Like Chaos Field, there are three different ships to choose from, and each has a sword which can deflect certain kinds of bullets. Your ship is also equipped with a shield which is automatically equipped when you stop firing. There's a combo bar in the upper right corner of the screen which determines your score multiplier, and there's two ways to increase it - either equip your shield and harvest energy from bullets or enemies, or use a Giga Wing / Mars Matrix-like weapon which will suck up all of the projectiles on the screen and convert them into energy. The combo bar slowly drops over time, so balancing out these methods is the only way to keep your scores high.

The scoring system and visuals introduce Radirgy as a fresh and interesting game, but the appeal wears off pretty quickly, and you're left with another experimental shooter, one with a terribly appalling soundtrack to boot. At least it's a bit more friendly than the intimidating Chaos Field, even though, once again, there's no two player option.

Like all Naomi games, Radirgy was initially ported to the Dreamcast, before hitting two other platforms - Radirgy PreciouS for the PlayStation 2, and Radirgy GeneriC for the GameCube (look at the first and last letters of each subtitle to get the horrible, horrible gag.) The PS2 version include the "Okawari Mode", which apparently is simply an ultra difficult mode, while the GC version has the "Manpuku Mode", which concentrates on scoring. The GameCube version was scheduled for released in America in 2007 by O~3 Entertainment, the same company that localized Chaos Field, but was cancelled since retailers refused to stock it. It was later bundled with Chaos Field and Karous for the Ultimate Shooting Collection for the Wii, which was released in English. In Japan, Radirgy was released for the 3DS eShop.