Excellent Bifurcation

By: Albert Lai

On: March 15th, 2007

In case you were not in the know, the Shmup-Dev
Autofire 2007 competition has finished! Clean
Asia comes in first, Excellent Bifurcation (which you may recognize from
the title of this post) comes in second, Force
Majure comes in third, Blessed comes in fourth, and, finally, Gravitron
fifth.

Excellent Bifurcation
is really an excellent game which, unfortunately, has not been brought to the
attention of TIGSource readers.

The premise is this: You have two ships. The government sends one into another
dimension and keeps the other one. You’re forced to pilot both simultaneously.

Now, it’s not as bad as it sounds (or, depending on what you have been thinking,
it’s worse). Both ships are ‘tied’ to each other. Where one ship is on one screen,
the other ship is on the other. If one dies, both die. Did I mention they were
unique? One is a ‘heavy and powerful’ ship, the other is ‘fast and small’ ship.
You can switch them between screens at will.

On the plus side, the levels are marginally easier than normal, and there are
plenty of delicious upgrades available, which change in form depending on type,
the ship that collects it, and the amount of powerups you have. What happens
if you have the maxed level of a weapon? Who knows? I certainly don’t!

Excellent Bifurcation is a most excellent game to improve your peripheral vision.
Personally, I have developed the habit of staring at a person’s right ear whenever
I talk to them. It’s all right, I’ve already made a lot of new friends. Lost
many more, but in the end it works out.