Vacant Ark (9.8Mb)
This an unusual side-scrolling shooter with quite a difference. As well as a range of great looking creatures to encounter, you only have 6 bullets and have to collect gems to reload each time you run out of bullets. There’s a lot more to it than this though. It’s a Japanese game with an English menu.
You play in an undersea scenario, with you as the pilot of a Cyborg mermaid, swimming in an ocean rather full of hostile creatures, including some rather hostile boss mermaids. You have something akin to an R-force device namely a ‘stone-fish’ in front of your craft that can act as a shield, weapon or converter to convert enemy bullets into gems to collect to get more bullets to fire. The option fire modes are riot, force and cannon. You do temporarily get a short range shooter while you are out of bullets. It’s a bullet-hell undersea environment, and your only chance is to stop enemies and enemy bullets in their tracks, as well as dodging what you can. You of course have to dodge if you haven’t collected enough gems to reload!
It all gels together very well, along with some amazing music, and there is some respite between full bullet-hell parts and some parts that aren’t quite so intense, to make it really very playable and a thoroughly enjoyable experience, if you like 2D shooters. The boss fights at the end of each of the 4 stages have a dual attack mode with a force device and red crystal ammo, some bosses are recurring and there’s a mini-boss to contend with as well, until the final boss encounter. Levels are timed, which means a boss will leave if you don’t defeat them in time, preventing progress to the next level. The 4 difficulty levels are called Shallow, Middle, Deep and Abyss.
The graphics are very well drawn and very imaginative, as well as it being a very colorful game to play. The sprite design is really fantastic. Gameplay is very fluid (I know it’s underwater!) as the animations are very crisp and smooth and the controls are well-responsive. It really is very impressive for a freeware game. I know some prefer ships or suchlike to fight and you might or might not like the undersea location, but it does play really well and it gets challengingly difficult/very difficult (as in Nintendo hard!) after the fairly easy first level. You have 3 lives to begin with which can increase up to a maximum of 6 lives. There are some great extra effects such as bubbles and rippling scenery and the game plays at a lower resolution giving a real retro feel to gameplay!
It should run in XP or lower. I’ve had it running on one Win 7 Ultimate laptop, but it wouldn’t run on another nor on my main Win 7 computer with a NVidia 7600 graphics card, nor on an XP machine with an ATI Radeon 1150 graphics card. Where it wouldn’t run it showed a Direct Draw error. As I have restored default advanced graphics settings and have the latest NVidia drivers, it seems to depend on which graphics card and driver you have installed whether it will run or not in XP, Vista or Win 7. As it’s such a good game it’s definitely worth giving it a try to see if it runs on your computer!
Controls are ‘Arrow’ keys to move, ‘Z’ key to shoot/toggle shield when released and ‘X’ key to toggle weapons mode. ‘Esc’ key or ‘Alt’ + ‘F4’ to quit and ‘F2’ to toggle between full-screen and windowed modes. ‘F1’ key to pause the game. Select in the menu using a ‘Shift’ key.
A great side-scrolling shooter if your computer will play it!
Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtbJbdgGXVY
Download HERE
Or HERE (game name is the download link for this location)
