Blamtastic!

Blamtastic! (JP: バリスティカ Barisutika BALLISTICA) is a fanonical action game for the Sega Saturn created by Travis4205 for his fanmade company EXEMPT.

Plot
the game revolves two girls in their mid-late teens, Pamela and Erin, going around the world trying to stop those balloons that randomly spawn

Gameplay
The basics of Blamtastic! is you have to avoid balloons that hurt you, and you have to shoot them, the balloons split when hit by your weapon, the gameplay is inspired by the Pang (known as Buster Bros. in North America) series.

Unlike most games that have the same gameplay style, one hit doesn't mean instant death by default means.

Modes

 * Classic
 * Bonanza
 * Plus

Settings
Gradual Play will Increase Maximum Setting up to it's true maximum.

Game

 * Beginning Lives: how much lives you start each game with. (dying 10 times increases the maximum limit by one, beating the game once unlocks the full maximum)
 * Default Setting: 2
 * Minimum Setting: 0
 * Initial Maximum Setting: 4
 * True Maximum Setting: 9
 * Continues: how much continues you begin with. (getting a game over by running out of continues increases the maximum limit by one, beating the game once unlocks the full maximum)
 * Default Setting: 2
 * Minimum Setting: 0
 * Initial Maximum Setting: 4
 * True Maximum Setting: 9
 * Infinite Continues: removes continues on favor of letting the player continue as much as wished, only available once you either beat game (on both Classic and Bonanza (Standard, 999 and Endless are not required), Plus is optional) once or getting a game over by running out of continues six times.
 * Initial Ball Speed: from 1 to 16.
 * Difficulty: Changes the limit of how fast the balls can go.
 * Practice: No Ball Speed Progression
 * Child: Up to 4 Speeds Faster
 * Easy: Up to 8 Speeds Faster
 * Normal: Up to 12 Speeds Faster
 * Hard: No Speed Limit (up to Speed 16)
 * Leniency: changes the progression rate.
 * Compensation: changes how easier the game gets after enough deaths.
 * Score Extend: Changes how much score required for extra lives.
 * Health: Changes how much health the player contains
 * Initial: 1/2/3/4/5
 * Maximum: 1/2/3/4/5

Audio/Video

 * Volume
 * SFX
 * BGM
 * Vocals
 * Bonanza Mode Music: Either the Default or the Stage's music.



Tropes

 * 1-Up: The Heart Variant.
 * Anti-Frustration Features:
 * If there's only one player playing and that player dies, you can skip the death animation. (However this is comes with a few seconds of loading in the PlayStation version)
 * If your Mercy Invincibility is wearing off on it's last second, you will flash red instead of white.
 * Dying enough times will slow down the balloons, making the game easier after the difficulty spike, well depending on the compensation setting that is.
 * If both players die at the same time, both players respawn instead of restarting, as long as you don't get a Time Over.
 * If you DO get a Time Over, you will start the next attempt with 10 seconds more.
 * Your remaining credits is not used when a second player joins in, however, Join-Ins are disabled if you don't have any continues.
 * Awesome But Impractical: The Blast Shield, it looks cool, and like other shields, protects you for one hit from any balloons, BUT, you have to manually dismantle it in order to actually deal damage, if you get hit by a balloon, the shield shatters, without exploding, the blast radius is also.
 * Big "YES!": Your character yells this when she gets the 1-Up item, averted when you get an extra life by score.
 * Charged Attack:
 * What you need to do to explode the Blast Shield, if it's less than 100% charge (it takes 2 whole seconds), it cancels out.
 * The Plasma gun functions similarly to the Mega Buster, allowing this, this comes with a price, it has a 10% chance of overheating, if it does end up overheating, you're forced to switch back to the default weapon, which is a single harpoon.
 * Collision Damage
 * Combo: In addition to doubling in score when you shoot the same balloon size (without multipliers, the maximum score you can get on one balloon is 6400), you also have a multiplier meter (a la Virtua Cop), shooting enough balloons will fill your combo meter, filling the combo meter will increase the multiplier by 1, you start with the additional multiplier at 0, giving you normal score on the balloons, missing reduces the combo bar by 1/4th of the full bar, getting hurt reduces the multiplier by 1, maximum is 9 (and thus maximum of 10x score multiplier), this multiplier also applies to collectibles and excess powerups, but not the 10 points you get for continuing.
 * Death Throws: depending on what size hit your character, she will fall/bounce off, if the smallest size hits her, she just freezes in place,
 * Difficulty Levels: An unusually wide range variant. AN EIGHT DIGIT-SCORE IS ACTUALLY POSSIBLE IN THIS GAME.
 * Expy: Pamela is basically a humanized Sapphire from Pop'n Music (even though this game came before the latter first appeared in Pop'n Music 8)
 * Every 10000 points: Score milestones will grant extra lives if allowed/necessary, by default settings, you will get an extra life at 500000, then 1000000, then 2500000, then 5000000, then every 5000000 points after, if you played Pang alot (more specifically the arcade games by Capcom), 5 million may be shockingly scarce. for an extra life for it's gameplay, but please be reminded that the scoring in this game is more extreme than you think, infact, an EIGHT-DIGIT SCORE IS ACTUALLY POSSIBLE (or maybe even a NINE-DIGITS).
 * Golden Snitch: The Star Balloon (An exact copy of the one from the Pang games, except it now comes with four sizes, which is all except the smallest).
 * Loads and Loads of Loading: The PlayStation port suffers from this, loading after the title screen, loading before each level and a bit of loading evertime you die (the Saturn and Podium Versions only loads, the Nintendo 64 version inverts this.
 * Mercy Invincibility: two whole seconds after taking an HP hit (getting hurt without a shield), Five whole seconds after a shield break.
 * One-Hit Kill: The two largest balloon sizes kills the player instantly regardless of how much health remaining.
 * One-Hit Point Wonder: Blamtastic! averts this trope unlike other games that have similar gameplay with Pang, normally you have two hit points. but shields still exists.
 * Tomboy and Girly Girl: Pamela and Erin respectively
 * Timed Mission: Not surprising considering its inspiration.
 * Random Number God: Downplayed with the Lucky Balloon, which only changes with every time it hits the ground, the item itself is not random, but there is a chance you can get a 1 Up instead of the usual two outcomes of pausing time for 10 seconds, or pulling off the Star Balloon.
 * Real-Time Weapon Change: You can change weapon, as you have two weapon slots, and you have a button to change it.
 * Rule Of Three: Each Stage has three levels, except the last one, which had four.
 * Songs In The Key Of Panic:
 * Classic and Plus modes have two of them, when the timer hits below 30.00, a frantic tune begins to play, when the timer goes down to 10.00, the music changes into what sounds like a sped-up funky doomsday-esque jingle.
 * Bonanza has two increasingly frantic tunes when there are too many balloons on screen, where the lucky balloon appears
 * Sprite-Polygon Mix - the 3D foreground/2D background variant, Averted in the 6th Gen Console releases, where it's full 3D.
 * Single-Use Shield: Four variants
 * The Green/Standard Shield just protects you for one hit.
 * The Red/Blast Shield allows you to blow the shield manually, however, if you get hit, the shield goes off without any explosion.
 * The Blue/Strength Shield allows two hits before going off.
 * The White Shield allows gradual healing (you recover 1 HP for every 10 seconds you have this shield intact), as a trade-off however, finishing a stage with this shield on, the shield goes off.
 * Yellow/Purple Contrast: Pamela is a blonde and Erin has purple hair respectively.

YMMV

 * Suspiciously Similar Song:
 * Stage 32 sounds similar to this track from the One Piece game for Game Boy Advance.
 * Bonanza Mode's Default Music sounds like the instrumental of this FNF song, except without the ending part
 * No Export For You: The Sega Saturn Version was only released on Japan, as the said console was recently discontinued in Europe when this game is developing.
 * Porting Disaster: Downplayed with the Nintendo 64 version, it's still perfectly playable, but the framerate is mediocre (getting 20fps at best).
 * Polished Port:
 * The ProtoGame Podium port allows 60fps if enough of the Podium's RAM is extended (via PodiumXtra/ALPHAPlus), and also less loading instances than the PlayStation version.
 * The PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Deluxe Edition of the PC port, and the ProtoGame BIGShot versions not only allowed all 60fps from the ground up (the latter console having the 60fps carried from it's predecessor, except without needing upgrades), but also upgraded graphics to have more polygons to look less blocky and more smooth, the HUD also looks less pixelated, and on top of that, you also have an Adventure Mode (which has the similar concept to Mega Pang Galaxy only without the confusing 3D dimension concept), Classic Mode is renamed to the "Arcade Tour" Mode, the PlayStation 2 version also doesn't have as much loading as it does in first PlayStation, not to mention, the BIGShot also allows widescreen because the console is capable of it, Arcade Tour and Plus modes are the same even in widescreen (those modes just change the HUD in widescreen to be similar with the later-released Pang Adventures), but Adventure mode takes advantage of widescreen.
 * What Could Have Been: There is a plan to have a Sega Saturn port, well downplayed is that it did make the port........, only in Japan.