'DariusBurst: Chronicle Saviours' Is The Game We've Waited Over A Decade For
The Outer Haven 9.0 / 10 Review
It's 4-player simultaneous LOCAL play. It's Social in the way you have to help each other unlock quadrants. It also replicates that old-school, walking into an arcade and seeing the displayed 'Hi-Scores' from other gamers that frequent the same place, feel!
F'in AWESOME ! ! ! 
Seeing games like this makes me miss Spirit from the old GameSpot boards! He would be ALL OVER something like this!!
Haven't heard from him in years though. He had a high-risk job, I believe... Don't quite remember what it was, but... fireman, maybe? I hope nothing bad happened to him! 
Is the online co-op cross platform? PS4 and Vita?
You can Cross-Save between PS4 and Vita, but I don't think there's cross-platform online play...
Even the shrews at NeoGaf are buzzing about DariusBurst. Half love it, the other half want it, but want a PHYSICAL release of it...
...and it might just happen! 
DariusBurst emulates the wide-screen effect of the arcade version by letter-boxing the view and zooming it out a bit. The Steam version actually supports Dual Monitor display!!
I remember playing the original Darius in the arcades! This brings back SUCH memories!!
Might not seem like such a big deal until you realize THE ORIGINAL DARIUS CAME OUT IN 1987 ! ! !
Wide-screen at --THAT-- time was REVOLUTIONARY ! ! !
Better picture with the Dev Team... I believe!
Mode Select
Chronicle Mode Map
Typical Boss
Lots o' Enemies Onscreen!
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Check out the various screen options available for the Steam version. The branching difficulty map is shown in here too, among other points of interest.
In case you are wondering, YES, the song you hear in the video is actually in the game! 
! !
This game is no joke! I'm having trouble Liberating areas on my own! I admit I am making it more difficult on myself, as I refuse to continue to get through the areas. This is hardly a game you can "One Credit" but I refuse to Continue for now. Got to Git Gud! I find it ironic that the Battleship I am having the most trouble with is named Phantom Fortress! It seems to have been built to specifically deter me! It's one of those bosses you need to destroy piece by piece; it usually wins by attrition, but man do I love fighting these!
There's hardly anyone else on my Cabinet. I would love if people from here were fans of this type of game, but I'm pretty much on my own, I think!
I love shmups, they used to be my favourite genre back in the arcade coin-op days. I tried loving them on consoles, I have quite a collection of all the supposed best ones. I think with age, my reflexes are not what they used to be, or I've lost my twitch gamer instinct I don't know what it is. I'm just not as good at these games as when I was 8. I love Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun and all the rest of them. I buy them. But have I enjoyed them? Not really, it's hard to enjoy a game when you suck so bad at it that you fail to get into any kind of rhythm.
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Listen to Wu-Tang and watch Kung-Fu
Maybe I was wrong about it getting average reviews, afterall!
First "negative" review I've seen: Destructoid 6/10. Jed Whitaker says one of the biggest draws of the game, the 3000 stages of the Chronicles mode, is Filler. One would think a community-unlocked, cooperative and competitive mode with various Challenges and a Leaderboard would be a selling point. He also didn't like the Letterbox nature or widescreen view of the game. Something the Darius series has been known for since Day One.
This is going to sound like "Sour Grapes" coming from me in this topic, but there's something I just don't like about that guy to begin with anyway, and a difference in opinion between he and I is almost expected. He got his start at Destructoid as "Beard...something" because, well, he has a beard. His MO was rejecting anything popular and playing very, very, very obscure Japanese games. He started as a Forum poster originally and they took him on as a regular shortly after. He's gay. He's a hipster, both by his own admission... but there's just something about the way he judges games that just rubs me the wrong way. He seems to add points to his reviews if it's a game nobody has ever heard of, but subtracts points if a game has a following greater than two people. Most of the games he's reviewed have been pretty negative, most I didn't care about. He just gave 'Dementium Remastered' a 1 out of 10, and even though I had no interest in the game whatsoever, it still bothered me for some reason.
I find I like Darren Nakamura and Chris Carter over at Destructoid, and wished they had given the game to one of them to review... A few people going into his review were excited for the game and his review turned them right off, which is a shame... It hasn't changed my opinion one bit; this was just another "off" review that just caught my eye; turns out it was just from a reviewer I didn't like in the first place anyway.
At the very least, his crappy review gave me a good pic to post! 
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The few people who I know that are interested in DariusBurst are split into two groups:
(1) The people who bought it and absolutely LOVE it.
(2) The people who can't get over the fact that it is a $60 digital game and refuse to get it digitally. (As if there will be another way to get it.)
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I'll admit, even I got sticker-shock there for a moment when I realized the $40 price was for the Vita version alone and the PS4 version was $20 more. Then I remembered how much I loved the Darius games on Genesis, SNES, PSOne and onward and I knew what I had to do!
Exploring the game a little bit more absolutely justifies the purchase, albeit a bit more than expected. It is PACKED with content! At quick glance, the game comes with the original Darius Burst arcade game, complete with fish battleship and chooseable difficulty paths through the systems. It comes with a remixed Burst EX mode with improved graphics and sound... Both of those are practically games in themselves... but --HERE'S-- the kicker:
Chronicles Mode in itself is --FANTASTIC-- ! ! ! You are assigned an Arcade "Cabinet". You share this cabinet with other players online. This is where the 3000 stages come into play. You have to work together to "liberate" quadrants of the solar system you are assigned to and the galaxies they are in. They often have rules about what ships you can take in, or what weapons you can use, or whether you can go in alone or with a second, local player. Once someone clears a stage, it becomes available to everyone else on that cabinet! The Highest Score for that quadrant is also displayed for other players to see...
This all adds to a tremendous old-school arcade feel and competitiveness that is literally not found anywhere else! Competition while SHMUP fans also cooperate with each other at the same time!!
Modern shoot-em-ups are usually 5 or 6 stages and rely solely on Score-Attack to keep players interested. This has thousands of stages, co-op and competetive play, leaderboards, mode remixes and more... such an INCREDIBLE value for fans of this genre!! WORTH. EVERY. PENNY!!
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