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This disc contains two shmups from developer CAVE: Muchi Muchi Pork, and Pink Sweets. While they both feature lots of destruction and bullet dodging action, they are very different games once you get to know them. And yes, this disc really is region free, so it will work on a North American 360.
The menus are a bit confusing at first. From the menu starting point, push up or down for some universal screen options, and push left or right to get to the games. If you are using tate mode on a rotated screen, the menu selections don't properly fit on the screen, so I suggest looking around outside of tate mode before enabling that feature.
Muchi Muchi Pork:
Muchi Muchi Pork is a pig-themed shooter. Ok, so, bear with me: You play as a pig-girl riding a flying bicycle, shooting down enemy planes and tanks which eject parachuting piggies, collect those to power a giant chainsaw, and use that to convert enemies into gold. While this sounds totally whacked, you'll have to trust me, it's awesome.
Converting enemies to gold is a real joy to behold. The more times you do this, the higher their value becomes. Once fully upgraded, the whole screen is often completely buried in giant gold items, skyrocketing your score.
Learning to properly score is very important in Muchi Muchi Pork. You can get a ton of extra lives from points, which greatly increases your chance of completing the game.
Also included is an arrange mode, which has different game mechanics and more bullets. If you get a copy of the game with an unused DLC code, there's a third game mode that adds bosses from Pink Sweets. Don't sweat it if you aren't able to get a DLC code though, as this mode isn't very well balanced in my opinion.
Pink Sweets:
Pink Sweets is sort of a sequel to Ibara, with many of the same characters. While the visuals appear kiddy, featuring windup toys and colorful lego towers, this is a seriously difficult and hardcore game, possibly CAVE's hardest game ever.
Playing Pink Sweets is a balance between offense and defense. When you stop shooting, you charge up a shield to deflect certain bullet types. Once fully charged, you get a bomb that causes a good amount of damage and cancels out any bullets that hit it. This is critical for boss fights, where you often need to play defensively and wait for an opportunity to counter-attack. Simple strategies such as "shoot stuff, then use a bomb when in trouble" will not work here. This is definitely a thinking man's shmup.
This game also has medal chaining, which is one of my favorite scoring systems in shmups. As you defeat enemies, every once in a while they will release a medal. Every time you grab a medal, they increase in value. Miss a medal, and their value resets. This creates some interesting dilemmas for score-oriented players, where it may be very dangerous to grab a high point value medal before it drops off the screen.
There are two versions of the arcade game, 1.0 and 1.1, where 1.1 is tweaked a bit and less punishing when you die. If Pink Sweets is too difficult, try switching to 1.1 in the options.
As with Pork, we also get an arrange mode for Pink Sweets. In this arrange mode, using bombs or "hado" shots (hold bomb to use them) converts bullets to point items, in addition to different rules for charging up shields and bombs. This is actually a really cool arrange mode; I find it vastly more fun than the original.
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This particular disk is very difficult to find now but if you pay a bit more and get this you'll enjoy evey moment of it is you like shooters like this.The disk works flawlessly on American region Xbox. The game menus and voices are all in Japanese, but that doesn't detract from the fun.
Now about the games. Games made by Cave are hard to evaluate since they all consist of shooting. The theme, characters, and graphics animations are different.
In Muchi Pork you fly as one of the three anthropomorphic women. The art and concept is a little Bizzarre. These three anime style characters show a lot of cleavage and "goods" but they have a cutesy pig face and ears. Very strange. They fight a variety of equally ridiculous and funny enemies, many of which are also some farm animal.
The second game is about two girls from some sort of Rosé Garden. You choose one and shoot your way out a lot of high tech enemies. I couldn't understand the plot too much, but the characters have very little clothes on them.
Actual gameplay and the games are excellent and well polished. No bugs, no freezes. The action is hectic but you can always find an empty space to hide in.
If you are really good at these games you can access the world wide leaderboards. Most top spots are taken by the Japanese. Try to get your score up.
You get many options such as controls, practice mode, extreme difficulty mode, changing wallpapers, turning the gameplay screen sideways or increasing it in size.
So, I recommend getting Mushi Mushi Pork and Pink Sweers while you still can.
(Game is Xbox exclusive)
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