If you were to plot all the games I’ve ever played on a graph, with one axis representing enjoyment and one representing competence, I dare say there’d be a reasonably clear pattern. There would, however, be one clear outlier. Treasure’s Ikaruga.
From the moment I first saw a playthrough of Ikaruga on SuperPlay – a pair of runs with commentary by the wonderful Dr Ian, I was hooked, and the fact that the game was available on the Xbox was the driving force behind me buying one. It’s a fantastic game, incredibly good fun, and one I’m really, really awful at. I mean clownishly bad. Not poor compared to the amazing players on SuperPlay, poor on some universal scale, in absolute terms. If I were to practice for years I could probably aspire to being merely bad, and a few years after that I could start entertaining looking at max chains. Until then, I just enjoy the music, composed by Hiroshi Iuchi (also the graphic designer and who worked on the incomparable Gradius V, the Sistine Chapel of shmups).
And for posterity, one of Dr Ian’s commentaries…