Ikaruga shoots its way to Xbox 360 Live Arcade in 2007
Ikaruga is a 2D vertically scrolling shooter game made by four developers at Treasure. The game has shooting enemies who come in one of two polarities: either black(/red) or white(/blue). The player’s ship can be either polarity. If the player is hit by a bullet of the same color, that bullet is absorbed and stored; if enough energy is stored, homing projectiles can be released by the player. However, enemy fire will damage or destroy your ship on contact.
For Dreamcast and GameCube fans of the game, or genre fans who haven’t played it yet, soon you’ll have your chance on Xbox 360. C&VG has access to Microsoft’s debug version of Xbox Live and Treasure’s cult-classic shooter Ikaruga appeared on their Xbox Live Arcade! No impressions could be given as their Xbox 360 debug machine only displayed the Treasure logo before crashing the game download. So this was probably a beta released too early, expect the game to be released in 2007 though.
Ikaruga was first released in Japanese Arcades in 2001, where the title means Spotted Dove; Ikaru is a both black and white Grosbeak bird, a clear reference to the game’s gameplay mechanics.
The later Dreamcast (2002) and GameCube (2003) releases also attracted developer Treasure’s devoted following to this 2D scrolling shooter. Not just because of its on average 90% high review score, but because the game was seen as the spiritual sequel to Radiant Silvergun, the introduction even mentions it as Project RS2. First level video here:
Interesting facts via Wikipedia.
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