Saturday, February 11, 2017

Battle Garegga Rev. 2016

As part of the M2 STG Triggers, Battle Garegga was released on Playstation 4 with various customizations, presets and various soundtracks. You can choose between Super Easy, Arcade, Premium or perhaps Custom where you can adjust the game rules. On Premium Mode, the rank may change for every stage you clear compared to Arcade Mode where your actions change the rank like getting full powered for instance. It's a notorious game for dynamic difficulty where losing a life on purpose decreases the rank. Also on Premium Mode, the medals can be attracted to you in you're in range but it depends on the game rank and the medal level. Getting the game rank to 100% may mean that the game is extremely difficult that way. On Super Easy, you don't have to worry about the rank like it's a normal shmup game like always.
Presentation-wise, you get the M2 Gadget which represents the HUD or some other stuff. It is all customizable and so is the controls, game settings and the soundtrack. The soundtrack consists of the Original, Revised version, Saturn Arrange version and Supersweep Remix version. And of course, even the physical copy won't contain the game disc as this is more or less a game released in the 90s originally and that it doesn't take up so much capacity of a Blu-Ray disc so making the game available on the disc is basically a waste of unused space of the disc and it can be expensive to buy a bunch of blank Blu-Ray discs needed for burning the game to them. A digital copy is already a better reason as it weigh so much of file size.
Even a physical edition of Darius on PS4 is much stranger than this but at least you do get a bunch of soundtrack CDs of the earlier Darius games as part of the series' 30th Anniversary. However, that will be a tale of another time.
And before the game was released for Playstation 4, there was a public location test version taking place in the arcades via a PC-based arcade machine running the game. It has the special switches that allowed the operators to switch soundtrack along with enemy bullet color. By doing so, it might result in restarting the game and there was even some M2-branded chip to emulate the game's original feel.
Lastly, there were DJ shows that played the game's soundtrack on the Pioneer-branded DJ set. It was unusual from what I saw and especially that the songs composed by Manabu Namiki were divided into multiple stems. They probably weren't MP3 files at all and transitioning between the songs from a soundtrack was a strange feat. The song, Marginal Consciousness, contained different melody which could be heard in the DJ video. Nobody knows where that comes from but at least, the song has an end unlike the one in the game which keeps on increasing the pitch non-stop to no end.