Cave has been wonderful to the iOS platform over the past couple of years, showering it with ports of some of their best games from their back catalog. Surprisingly, their brand of manic shooters have translated extremely well to the touch screen, arguably as-good-as or better than playing them with physical controls.
Then earlier this year something strange happened: Cave released an original shooter designed from the ground-up for smartphones, something fans had been wanting them to do for a long time, but released it exclusively as an Xbox Live game on the Windows Phone 7 platform.
What’s up, Cave? I thought we had a pretty good thing going on here on iOS. Now, I happen to like the Windows phones just fine, but they lag well behind both iOS and Android in amount of users, and mostly I was just jealous that a new Cave game was coming and I wouldn’t be able to play it on my precious iPhone. Today, Cave is finally making my wish come true as they have announced that their original smartphone shooter Dodonpachi Maximum is heading to the iOS platform this week.
The premise behind Maximum is that you’re playing inside a bullet-hell simulator, and the game is comprised of levels and ships culled from previous releases Dodonpachi Resurrection ($5.99) and Dodonpachi Blissful Death ($2.99). Being built specifically for smartphones, Dodonpachi Maximum has a much cleaner look compared to its brethren whose sprit from arcade years past could look a bit pixelated on modern screens. Also it forgoes the whole virtual button thing and allows you to pull off certain attacks with simple tap or double-tap gestures. Check out the trailer below from the Windows Phone version.
As with all Cave titles, you’ll need to be sporting newer hardware to run the game. It’s listed as compatible with iPhone 4 and up and the 2nd and 3rd generation iPads, though apparently it may not run at full speed even on an iPhone 4 and mention of iPod touch compatibility is nowhere to be found. Also, it’ll be “optimized" for the iPhone 5 screen, though that appears to be just a border added to the extra space rather than a larger play area.
I’m cool with that, though. I just want this game on my device asap. Which is good that Dodonpachi Maximum is set for release this coming Thursday, which should mean it’ll be available in the US late Wednesday night, so not long to wait now. It’ll be on sale for a limited time for $6.99 before shooting up to its normal price of $11.99, so be sure to keep your eye out for it with this week’s new releases.
