Thumping techno beats, lasers, explosions and half-naked bird ladies. What more could you ask for in a shmup? HARPY!SIREN! is the latest release by incredibly prolific electronic music maestro Renard Queenston, and part of his ‘bootleg’ line of games which do for shooters what his copyright-baiting mashup line does for music.
HARPY!SIREN! (it feels right to write it like that) is a franken-game. An experiment in taking apart a huge range of sprites and sounds and effects and concepts from 16-bit shooters and mashing them together into something new. Sadly, the game was never completed, but rather than just ditch the project, Renard has opted to release the half of the game (Originally planned to be 6 stages, but only 1, 2 & 6 were completed) that was finished. Good for us, because it’s a rock solid bit of 16-bit shmupping, even if a little short and unbalanced.
This is definitely an old-school kinda shooter. No massive waves of bullets, but no instant respawning either. The obstacles come at you steadily and methodically and you need to deal with them or get bumped back to the last checkpoint you saw. The shooting is straightforward and accessible stuff – a broad spread of bullets normally and a slow-moving focus mode that lets you fire short bursts of concentrated laser beamy death. There’s no powerup system, but there is a respectably complex scoring system based around collecting the gems that burst out of enemies without letting them fall off the bottom of the screen.
It’s a real pity that this one never got finished, because aside from the fun inherent in playing ‘What game is that sprite from?’, this is a really polished game. The graphics actually come together really nicely, and it doesn’t feel like they’re mashed together from a dozen different games. The levels on show are actually much more varied than you’d expect, with the second level focused almost entirely on avoiding static hazards. Despite enemy bullets being small in number and fairly scattered, it’s surprisingly easy to die. As such, I still haven’t achieved the bonus goal hinted at in the readme file – a ‘true’ final boss that only surfaces if you complete all the stages without continuing.
Of course, being a Renard production, the music and sound design is top notch. I’m not sure if I recognize the tracks used in the game from his usual output, but it sounds like all new work, rather than a mashup like his previous sprite-ripped release, Dash-Da-Dash DX. The first level track in particular is great, and the boss loop is intense. There’s also a fair bit of heavily distorted original voice-work, and the pleading message you get at the game over screen is actually pretty creepy/cool.
You can grab HARPY!SIREN! here. It’s Windows-only and was made with Multimedia Fusion 2, which seems to be pretty popular these days. As a bonus aside, Renard also just released a free new gaming-themed ‘shmup-punk’ album entitled Robot Brainstronaut Blastoff!!! – The best thing? It’s free. Well, if you want it to be. It’s pay-what-you-want, but the minimum price is $0. There’s a lot of nostalgic videogame sounds in there, so check it out.
Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Freeware Game Pick – ‘HARPY!SIREN!’
