Shmups(shoot ‘em ups) were are really popular type of game a long time ago. But lately their popularity seemsto have dropped quite a bit. But here comes Nanostray, a 3D, top to bottom scrolling shmup, where it’s you with a little ship against an army of enemies. The game was shipped in very small quantities in the US, and I’m not expecting much better in the European release that happenned in November. But does this game really deserve such low shipments and so little popularity? Here are my thoughts on this game.

Graphics The game looks beautiful. This game features real-time rendered backgrounds that look incredible, nicely modeled and designed enemies, although some of them look weird, and nice special effects, and the main ship looks quite nice too. Even with those great graphics, there is basically no slow-down. It only happens when there are a lot of enemies on the screen all shooting at the same time while you are using a bomb and shooting, which rarely happens. This game really shows off the power of the Nintendo DS.

Controls A : Shoot
B : Special attack
X : Bomb
L : Shoot(useful when you want to change weapon, which lets you continue to shoot while changing weapons)
R : Attract coins

Play modes
Adventure : You go through the 8 stages featured in the gameone after another. There are 3 difficutly settings. On Normal mode, you can get hit 8 times before dying(collisions with other ships always kills in one hit), you completely replenish your 3 bombs when you die, and you have 5 ships to go through the game and infinite continues for when you lose all your ships. On advanced mode, you can get hit 3 times before dying(collisions with other ships always kills in one hit), yon recover 1 bomb when you die and you only have 4 ships to go through the game and only 3 continues. In expert mode, you die in one hit whatever happens, you have only 3 ships and 3 continues, and you don’t replenish your bombs when you die.

Arcade : Each time you complete a stage in adventure mode, you unlock it in Arcade mode. In this mode the main premise is to beat your own score. The game is at advanced mode all the time here. When you get a new high score, you are given a « Nanocode », which you can enter at nanostray.com to compare your scores to other peoples scores. You must find different tricks in every stage to get higher scores. The main strategy is to gather all the blue coins without using your special weapons during the stage, since when you get a blue coin when you have a full special bar, you get 500 points times the number of coins you got with a full special bar. There is also a bonus tat is given at the end of the stage called « valor » which gets lower each time there is a bullet on the screen. So the less you shoot, the higher your valor bonus ends up. This is the mode you will waste the most time in.

Challenge : This mode is pretty self-explanatory. You have 22 challenges that test different of your aptitudes. Some require to get a high valor bonus, some requitre to get a certain score, some ask you not to use special weapons. Each challenge unlocks something. It can be 3D models of enemies to view, artwork for stages, or music. This is a very challenging and fun mode to play in.