Don't ask.
Big Bang Mini is a Nintendo DS shoot-em-up designed by French developer Arkedo Studio, who also worked on the Breakout clone Nervous Brickdown. The game is mostly stylus-based, and your objective is to defeat enemies on the top screen by flicking your stylus upward to create fireworks. The hard part is not only the fact that you have to also use the stylus to physically move your ship around projectiles, but if your own projectiles don't hit an enemy, they explode in a shower of other projectiles, resulting in even more for you to dodge. This game isn't particularly easy. Or sane, either.The game received much praise, even being featured in IGN's 2009 Awards.
This game uses of the following tropes:
- Bonus Stage: After every level, you'll have to connect the dots with your "ship" in the correct order to reveal a picture.
- Bullet Hell:
- Paris. You have the sheep that launch 8 homing missiles at once, the birds and owls that throw very fast feathers directly downwards, and the paper planes that launch very fast aimed attacks.
- The Paris boss's final stage. You have to avoid 2 sets of radial attacks.
- The Abyss boss's second, third and final stages. The second you have to avoid richocheting missiles and fast and sudden aimed shots, the third you have to avoid very fast radial attacks, and the final you have 2 sets of very dense, very big radial attacks to avoid. Harsh stuff.
- Cats Are Mean: The Paris level features a creepy black cat as its boss.
- Dem Bones: The Kamakura level features skeletons and other undead enemies.
- Doomy Dooms of Doom: The instruction manual gleefully refers to each stage boss as an "X OF DOOOOOM!"
- Fission Mailed: The second-to-last stage of B.O.S.S. is the words "GAME OVER" followed by an asterisk.
- No One Could Survive That!: The later levels.
- Power Copying: On the New York level, you can steal the powers of a few enemies by tapping them with your stylus as they fly to the bottom screen.
- Sequential Boss: All of the main bosses have four forms. The final
boss"B.O.S.S." has eight. - Under the Sea: Abyss, the final level.
