Скачать или смотреть [PC] Clean Asia! - Perfect Clear (Reflector) 7,258,750

Clean Asia! (クリーンエイシア！) is a 2007 indie shmup created by Jonatan "cactus" Södeström, who you may recognize from his work on the Hotline Miami series, as well as some of his more esoteric indie titles such as Mondo Medicals and Tuning.

This game was made in GameMaker for a contest on the shmup-dev.com forums; given the originality of the gameplay and stunning vector-esque visual presentation, Clean Asia! handily won the competition, and would also be nominated for some awards at the 2008 IGF competition.

The game comes with two shottypes; the "Attractor," which dashes into enemies to absorb debris and fire it back at them, and the "Reflector," which functions moreso like a regular shottype in a shoot'em'up, with a main shot, a shield, a charge shot, and a bomb.

Most enemies in the game drop Debris items when destroyed, and for the Reflector these items function as your power; you need to collect 100 Debris to powerup your shot, up to a maximum of 9 levels. You start out with two levels of power, and are reset to two levels when you die. You can also use Debris to activate your shield with X, which drains Debris at a steady rate but makes you impervious to bullets or contact damage (at the cost of locking you in place and not being able to collect Debris as you hold down X), or fire a powerful bomb with V, which uses one power level. Your charge shot with C locks you in place for a short while, but is incredibly-powerful when it fires off, and it even scales in damage with your power level to become even stronger. You start each stage with three lives.

The game itself is rather short, and contains only three stages that can be played in any order; Thailand and Korea are boss rushes with seven bosses each, while China is intended as a proper stage that is longer in length, ending in its own boss. The challenge with Thailand and Korea especially is that enemies really like to swerve all over the screen in the same way that makes Yamame from SA difficult except way, WAY worse, making it incredibly easy for enemies to snipe you if you aren't anticipating them hanging super low on the screen.

Thailand: Most bosses here aren't too scary if you time your Shields just right, but Minimal/Cross and Luminal/Ring are very dangerous since they can wall you, so using a bomb in the latter and spamming charge shots in the latter is absolutely necessary. If you kill Abominal/Heart or Divisinal/Sattelite while their bullets tendrils are out, they continue to fire outwards, so if you make the mistake of killing them as the tendrils retract you can very easily wall yourself by accident.

Korea: The bosses here have a gimmick where if all attached weapons are destroyed, the center 'eye' of the boss fires off their own unique bullet patterns. Absolutely the hardest stage because the "hanging around the bottom of the screen" issue makes the enemies' second patterns super difficult, especially for the third and seventh bosses. Dying in this stage is also REALLY bad because, while the boss parts are weak, the Reflector's damage and range at power level 2 is abysmal. Thankfully at power level 9 the enemies just melt.

China: The gimmick here is that the enemies themselves do not drop Debris, but five objects at the bottom of the screen emit a constant stream of Debris for you. The stage enemies can destroy these objects if they hit them, but given how powerful the bomb is you can make quick work of everything before that becomes a problem. The screenshake from enemies dying does make it really hard to dodge dense waves, especially when the wheel enemies show up. The boss at the end is kinda scary but since you have your shield, you should absolutely use it at most opportunities; the boss itself will only be damaged by hitting its arms at first (similar to Fractal Fighter, another cactus shmup made around this time), and changes its patterns several times as it loses health.

Score in this game comes from destroying parts of an enemy fast enough; destroying several pieces in a combo multiplies your score by quite a lot. The China stage doesn't really play by this rule, so your score comes exclusively from Thailand and Korea.

Obviously, this game is incredibly ancient for its time and has some jank, but I still consider this one of the absolute greatest indie shoot'em'ups ever made, due to the elegance of its gameplay and the beautiful presentation. You will never hear Quake III Arena voicelines the same ever again. Clean Asia! is actually one of the first PC shmups I ever played, so the nostalgia factor also contributes to my undying love for it as well.

Download the game here:
http://cactusquid.rf.gd/ (The "Cactus Arcade" DL is broken at the moment, but Clean Asia! by itself is below it and works)


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