B-14 Bird Fortress

Intro

"B-14 Bird Fortress" a side-scrolling shooter that was developed by Irog using an unspecified programming language and was developed for RMN's 14th Birthday event. I suppose I should look at the bright side. At least the event name was a lot shorter than the one for the site's 4th birthday. Though the thing the bugs me the most about this game is it's name.

For starters the game's name is most likely inspired by the famous B-17 Air Fortress from World War II. A plane whose durability is the stuff of legends. Of course, the Air Fortress has inspired other crafts in other media as well like the MG-100 StarFortress SF-17 in Star Wars: Episode VIII The Last Jedi.



Albeit the StarFortress is a really confusing turd in that movie since it's delivery system doesn't make any sense, but I probably shouldn't allow myself to get distracted by poorly thought out weapons in science fiction at the moment.

My next issue is that the B should stand for bomber, but our character doesn't drop bombs but merely fires bullets. As such the player isn't controlling a bomber, but a fighter in my opinion. So the game's name would make a lot more sense if it was something like 'F-14 Tomcat of Death' and featured a flying cat wielding a mini gun firing upon flying squirrels or something, but I suppose I'm kind of rifling through the weeds at this point on a rather minor detail.

Gameplay

On the gameplay side of things this game is about as bare bones as you can get. On the plus side you can change the control layout to something you'd prefer and can move in eight directions. On the other hand, moving up and down causes your bullets to shoot at any angle which makes the game harder in my opinion since making diagonal shots requires a lot more planning than a straight one, but I suppose on the bright side it means you can hang out near the top of the screen and still take out a few of the enemies in the middle of the screen rather easily.

Unfortunately the game also lacks a lot of features you'd expect like power-ups that change how your bullets operate or the ability to pick up bombs you can use to clear the screen of enemies and bullets in order to save yourself. These tend to be rather standard features in these kinds of games so the lack of them is really off putting. And to make matters worse the game lacks boss fights as well.

And the control overview operates in a weird fashion in this game. While it won't advance if you fail to perform the action it specifies at the start of game. It can also be stalled out by bullets being on screen. Meaning the control overview can take over 60 minutes if you want it to by simply holding down the fire key and never letting go. Or you could use a system of stops and starts as long as the next shot happens before the last bullet leaves the screen.

I suppose this does make beating Irog's challenge of lasting over five minutes rather easy. After all, you can simply spend over five minutes mindlessly shooting bullets while the game tries to explain the controls to you.

Graphics

I'm not sure I can really judge this aspect of this game since I really don't know what the programming language they used is even capable of. So I don't know if the game is visually impressive or utterly underwhelming.

Sound

As you can imagine the amount of sound effects and musical tracks in this game is highly limited. You've gotten a title screen song and a song that endlessly loops as you fight the butterflies. And a handful of sound effects for moving up and down through the menu options as well as for scoring or taking hits. And both parties also get a unique sound for when they fire upon the enemy. As a result you'll probably want to turn the sound off on this one after a while. After all, you can only hear the sound of a dying butterfly so many times before you'll prefer silence and playing some music of your own in the background.

Conclusion

On one hand this is an event game that was crafted in under 14 hours. So I really wasn't expecting that much out of it, but the lack of upgradable bullets, power-ups, or a final boss fight with a giant butterfly or something is really disappointing. This game really didn't need all of those things after all "Pterattack" on Neopets was a fun game to play every now and again and that game only gave you various weapon types as well as the ability to upgrade those weapons as long as you collect bullet upgrades of the same color. While other old flash games like "Twilight Win" include challenging boss fights and a super hard setting if you enter the infamous Konami code. So while I wasn't expecting much from this game in the grand scheme of things. It still manages to disappoint me since it's been stripped down to the point it feels like something you'd come across on a cheap game collection like "Action 52".