Like many gamers this past December I ended up spending over $120 on a videogame, however unlike most of those poor souls I didn't end up with a cheap plastic skateboard and a staggering sense of disappointment. No, my money was more wisely invested importing the latest CAVE shooter to grace the 360, Mushihime-sama Futari Ver 1.5. Though I've long been a fan of shoot'em ups (AKA shmups), I really didn't quite know what to expect with this title. Sure I had a rough idea of what it was like from various YouTube videos, but being Canadian I had never actually had a chance to play it. Would the controls be tight? Was the scoring system fun? Could I really justify the cost? These questions raced through my head but in truth I only really cared about one thing — it was region free. For the first time this generation I could play a proper Japanese shmup on my North American Xbox 360, so as soon as I had the free money I placed my order. Two long days of staring at a FedEx tracking screen later, it arrived.
Throwing the disc in my drive, I was greeted with a few logos and a surprisingly English menu offering Ver 1.5, Arrange and Black Label, though Black Label was unavailable as it has to be downloaded off the Marketplace. Selecting Ver 1.5, I was presented with another set of options, Arcade mode or Xbox 360. On CAVE's last title, Deathsmiles, Xbox 360 mode was slightly altered from Arcade, but here it appears to just determine whether you play with the original sprites or ones redrawn at a higher resolution. Following my selection I was taken to the main menu where I could choose from single credit Score Attack, credit feed Normal Mode, training and a bevy of configuration options.
While it's common for shmups today to feature dozens of display options, Futari takes things a step further by letting you adjust every tiny aspect of the presentation. Under layout you can adjust normal settings like rotation, display aspect ratio, zoom and position, but now you can also add four independently configurable ExtraViews. Each ExtraView can be focused on a specific part of the screen like your character or the score, positioned anywhere you like and zoomed as big or as small as you want. They can also be smoothed independently and delayed to create some rather neat effects. One layout preset has five full screen displays placed beside one another, each running 0.3 seconds behind the last to create a cascade of progress effect. It's functionally useless, but looks really cool. When you're done designing your layout you’ll move on to the picture settings menu where you can adjust effects such as scan-lines and RGB masks, simulate glare and manipulate the colourspace. The bias of each effect can be independently tweaked and the colourspace can be adjusted for Brightness, Gama, Contrast, Saturation and Hue. As if this wasn't enough there are still more options available to adjust for the background wallpaper settings and frame delay. This is the most robust settings package I have ever seen and hopefully it will become the standard for all releases going forward.
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