Yep, I found the try not to kill the bigger (and nastier) baddies mechanic very compelling. For a while there I was seriously hooked – as in ‘seeing images of little rotating square bullets when I closed my eyes’ kind of hooked.

Obviously with modern shmups there are all sorts of complexities involving scoring and multipliers, including avoiding the shooting of certain enemies at certain times, but there was something about the elegant simplicity of Quantizer’s multiplier that really made the game for me. It was like risk/reward in concentrated form – abundant in its rewards, but brutally unforgiving of mistakes (having the smart bomb reset the multiplier was a particularly evil yet cool touch!)

As a matter of fact, I’ve been meaning to come back to when I get a moment so I can get hooked all over again.

As far as that shmups.com poster’s comment that the scoring system is ‘broken’ goes… it’s one thing to say you can just kill the small enemies to build up a huge chain, but it’s another thing to actually do while inundated with bullets and baddies. And anyway, that’s where the fun is. Of course, it’s also where the pain is when you accidentally kill a big’un and blow your huge multiplier right before the end of a level! (Pain in a kind of good way, though.)