... not even sure if these even really qualify as entries, though. :V
I'm not much of a "normal danmaku" type of guy.
If only I knew how telling this remark would be. There is an irony to the fact that, while the theme of the contest was "dead simple", you went out of your way to mess with the core mechanics of the genre to make something that is plays with far more complexity.
And it falls flat on its face.
I'll start with the first spell, gravity. When I saw that I could bend the direction of the bullet, and that I couldn't fire, I immediately knew that I had to make it slam back into the boss, but I struggled initially trying to achieve this long enough that hint text popped up telling me what I already knew.
Here is the first, fundamental problem with the spell: it modifies the core game mechanics in such a way as that the player has to learn how to play it. A curiosity it may be that you
can do something like this, but that doesn't make it intuitive, or fun.
And there is the next problem; for the majority of the spell, there is a single bullet on the screen, 5 at the most. It's pretty easy to see that cover fire would be unfair when trying to pull a bullet into the boss, but that only really serves to highlight that there is something wrong with the concept; I am not going to sugar-coat this, I was dead stiff
bored by this spell, something I can't say about even a second of gameplay in a SHMUP that I have had in the past. There was no real challenge, there was no sense of accomplishment(the HP went down such a small amount for each hit, hits that were hard to land due to a target being smaller than it should be for such a gimmick), it was horrifyingly monotonous, and I didn't even have the comfort of the timer to cut me off when things dragged on too long.
And when you get bored, you make mistakes. You stop investing mental effort into the activity, and you use what remains to try to make it go by quicker and suffer because of it. I'm sure you've played a videogame where you were fighting some hard boss, and you had found a pattern that more or less let you damage him without letting harm fall to yourself... it takes a while, you can see the HP going down, and you slowly get bored as the variation in the fight has left; so you get ambitious. You try to get in a second hit. That's when you mess up, that's when you get hit, die, and receive such a dose of frustration from having screwed up a done deal that you might even consider quitting. It is quite literally death as the result of boredom.
And that just isn't fun.
Moving on from there, the second spell was a welcome relief in that I could see a timer ticking down. It was a survival spell, plain and simple, and having the "friends" begin to take up all parts of the screen vertically was a great way to add challenge during the last part of the attack.
And, the third spell. First noting that the timer once again no longer existed, I found that what appeared to be non-regulation bullets had started appearing. Were it not for my knowledge of the contest rules, it would have been a while before I guessed that I had to grab them...but perhaps you had set up hint text for that spell as well.
As per the name of the spell, I began to collect the blue orbs as they formed, and unlike the the first spell, there
was cover fire here, but unlike the first spell, there were absolutely
no signs of progress for each time the gimmick was satisfied. I was left to wonder if collecting the blue orbs did anything at all, and I slowly began to lose interest, not moving up to collect each as it formed. And such an oddity it was that this loss of interest was
rewarded, as the blue orbs would continue to spawn, meaning I needed to make fewer trips if I just let them accumulate.
The spell ended, having overstayed its welcome, and the script ended. I closed danmakufu, and deleted the script, knowing that even if I kept it around, I would likely never play it again.
Maybe some of the others here disagree with me, but this was genuinely my experience playing the script. It had been an exercise in originality and change for its own sake, to the point that it removed the safeguards of bombing to quickly damage the opponent and a timer to end the attack before it overstayed its welcome. It never allowed the player to directly attack, making the differences in shot types almost meaningless... and though a good deal of effort was probably expended to make this something original and new, all it amounted to for me was a moment of "oh, that's neat", leading into just wanting to get it over with. I only wish the effort put into these gimmicks could have yeilded something more.
