***It's GAMING DAY!*** "The Emperor of Crappy Games", "The ..

***It's GAMING DAY!*** "The Emperor of Crappy Games", "The Lowest Emperor", & "Master Death"... They all are used by Japanese video game fans online to describe a single game: Death Crimson. A video game so infamous that even saying just its name can potentially deliver psychological pain to certain people Oh boy, where does one start when it comes to the original Death Crimson? I guess, to be as fair as possible, we should start with how the game technically operates. It's a single-player "Dark Gun Shooting" light gun game comprised of eight "scenes" across three stages with the objective simply being to shoot every enemy that appears on screen, getting them before they manage to hit you; you also have to avoid shooting the occasional friendly, else you lose a life. Enemies that are about to hit you get a reticle around them, ala Virtua Cop or any Time Crisis (after the first). Death Crimson changes things up a little by way of the Evolution Level Gauge, which raises with each hit & lowers with each miss. Sadly, this doesn't really work out quite as it intends, simply because Death Crimson is a fundamentally broken game, so much so that it hurts in every way. This is indicated before you even start playing, because if you want to play with a light gun you have to first calibrate it... With a single shot to the center of the screen, and with no way to check if it works for you. You can use the gamepad, but the cursor moves way too fast for you to play with any sense of consistent accuracy at a pace to keep from getting hit. Apparently, you can also play with the Saturn's mouse, but Ecole supposedly forgot to map reloading to one of the mouse buttons, which makes it literally unplayable that way. Anyway, regardless of which method of input you play with, actually playing this game is a pain, for a variety of reasons. Easily the most aggravating problem is that enemies don't telegraph their attacks at all. While the reticle does indicate who will be attacking next, the actual enemy models don't change to reflect this, making for a strong disconnect between who is attacking & who isn't when hit with groups of enemies. There's also the fact that the pacing of the game is all over the place, going from slow paced & relatively easy to fast & impossible to not get hit in a blink of an eye, making it hard to keep up with the game very often. In fact, it's not uncommon to see an enemy get a reticle, only for the stage to auto-advance before the enemy can even get an attack off! Yes, the game can't even keep up with itself. How about the Option Guns, which you use by holding your attack button/trigger until a meter at the top fills? They're a very unbalanced lot, with the machine gun being essentially useless because of the erratic pace of the game & generally slow firing rate, the missile launcher being downright broken because it's a literal screen-clearing bomb that you shoot at to explode, & the bomb shot is just the missile launcher, only without needing to shoot it to make it explode. Really, though, the entire game is just a mess to play, with stages that run for far too long & feel more like meandering instead of advancing (the camera goes all over, too, making it seem like Echizen can fly), weapons that aren't balanced one bit, & enemy placement & timing that makes the game downright unplayable. While I did technically "get better" as I kept trying, I just decided to cheat & activate invincibility (because I could never beat the first scene), and I could just tell that Death Crimson doesn't seem like it's something that a normal player can actually play through & beat legitimately, or at least do so with any semblance of "fun". Unfortunately, the game can't even let you cheat properly, as the debug mode (through which you activate invincibility) has to be activated at the start of every single stage with the Player 2 controller, and it doesn't even seem to work properly once you get the second boss! This game just actively tries its hardest to keep you from having fun & trying to understand just what exactly is going on. As you can see, I didn't bring up the visuals, and that's simply because they're just as bad as everyone says online. It's nothing but a blocky & poorly modeled mess, with tons of pop-up (enemies often appear for a single second before disappearing, & sometimes they can even still be shot after disappearing!), & even the sprite work is pretty shoddy. On the other hand, the music, though not exactly well produced by any means, is actually kind of catchy in its awkward simplicity; it's honestly the "best" part of the game. Overall, Death Crimson more than deserves its status as one of the absolute worst video games ever made, but as I mentioned earlier, the game managed to sell well enough because of how terrible it was, so a sequel got greenlit. And oh my...that trailer for the sequel! LOL To be continued... but don't you worry, there's a reason why I'm talking about this game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMO5dBudrDU&t=207s