Bullet Hell, meet bullfighting.
No one-liner describes it better bullfighter neonintroduced himself to Kickstarter backers earlier this week until Spanish indie studio Relevo. The 13-year-old company specializes in homages to the sub-sub-genre of “futuristic sports” featured in 1990s titles like windjammer or cyberballand their latest effort, fittingly, grew out of a bull session a couple of years ago.
“We were busy with other projects at the time,” Relevo executive director Jon Cortazar told Polygon. “But when we decided to start a new project aimed at crowdfunding, bullfighter neon immediately came to mind. It’s the kind of crazy idea, with a dash of controversy, that could help push for a Kickstarter.”
To be perfectly clear, this isn’t a literal bullfight (or rather, the video game representation of it). Cortazar and his peers aren’t fans of it either, even though there is a strong cultural tie to the blood sport in Europe. (Relevo is based in Bilbao, where the 14,781-seat Vista Alegre square has hosted bullfighting competitions since 1882.)
Their concept includes a robotic bull; besides, the bull is not direct attacked. Instead, the goal is to dodge and distract it is Attacks (some of which can be traced back to the bull) until his battery dies and the bull falls over. It is more crutch (cloak) than it is Espada.
“We set strong boundaries from the start to accept violence within the game,” Cortazar said. “We designed a robot fight where the robot has all the firepower and the armored bullfighter only has a light muleta deal with the challenge. The only way to win is to exhaust all of his [the robo-toro’s] Battery with the neon muleta and making passes while dodging and parrying his attacks.”
This is where bullet hell comes in; Players need to memorize attack patterns, or at least pay close attention when the bull rains death on the matador, for a change. Here are a few GIFs to illustrate the point:
Image: Relevo
Image: Relevo
bullfighter neon‘s Kickstarter page says players can choose from six different Matador characters to battle eight Cyberbeasts, followed by two “additional final bosses.” Battles take place in four different arenas with environmental hazards; Single player and local co-op multiplayer are available. There’s also a story mode that Cortazar compared to street fighter 2, “where you see each character’s story and a different ending depending on your choices.”
bullfighter neon, scheduled for a launch on Steam by the end of the year, I noticed for several reasons. The first is the 16-bit style, the attraction mode and the flashing PRESS START BUTTON and the matador’s knock-down animation all look like a really weird thing the local hangout would have taken the hands of an amusement dealer when I was a teenager
Second, I am a firm believer in Hemingway’s holy trinity of sports — namely, “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering.” (“Everything else is just games,” he added.)
I have seen many of the last two (if SSX or Shaun White snowboarding count) and none of the former. (That is, until McWhertor brought Segas bullfight and the to my attention, proving that I should never call a video game first to do anything.)
with bullfighter neon, finally my male circle of sports video games is complete! Cortazar played along and offered his own Hemingway trilogy: his own game (of course), the original Grand touring on PlayStation and 1080º snowboarding on Nintendo 64.
Although: “I have to point out that our last game was actually a 48 KB snowboarding game made in assembler for a vintage platform, the MSX system,” said Cortazar.
