You move your ship by sliding your finger across the screen, and firing is automatic by default. If I could plug a joystick into the phone, I just might, but the touch controls are a perfectly playable alternative. It’s a much easier game than either of its predecessors while still maintaining its depth, its frenzied pace and the ability to bring both intense concentration and mortal fear out of the player.īut how does it work out on the iPhone? Great, actually. Beneath the waves of enemy fire hid a tremendously complex and challenging scoring system, full of tricks and secrets, that held the hardest of the hardcore rapt.Īfter the impossibly cruel sequel Daioujou, a game aimed at the hardest of the hardest of the hardcore, Resurrection is an attempt to reclaim some of the accessibility Dodonpachi had in ‘97. The first game (we’ll leave out Donpachi for brevity’s sake), dating back to 1997, was one of the earliest examples of a “curtain-fire” shooting game. Resurrection (also commonly known as the Japanese title, Daifukkatsu, meaning pretty much the same thing) is the third title in the Dodonpachi series. Cave’s second iPhone release, Dodonpachi Resurrection, is superb: perhaps the highest-quality arcade-style shooting you’re going to find on the platform. I’m glad to report that that isn’t the case here. You’d expect that such heavy games as these-games that demand pixel precision as the player navigates through a deadly, screen-concealing haze of bullets-wouldn’t work out so well on the iPhone, which has typically had issues with traditional games designed for joysticks and directional pads. In a surprising move (one which actually somewhat enraged the cult), Cave has even started to port its arcade shooters to the iPhone. Thankfully Cave has reached out to its passionate foreign cult in recent years. You’d have to import a copy of a console port, if it existed: if not, well, you can make it to a Japanese arcade, right? It was a minor tragedy that these kings of an unpopular genre had no desire to leave their native land, but there it was. For years, famed 2D shooting game developer Cave had been content to leave its work in Japanese arcades.