Chouyoku Senki Estique, another impressive STG homebrew

[Ghegs]

Some tweets have revealed another shmup homebrew in the works for the Famicom:

https://twitter.com/kakikukecat/status/1703000964171800902
https://twitter.com/kakikukecat/status/1717844208776777817

I honestly thought that was a Genesis shmup on first glance. I'm not sure if the game has a title yet, I couldn't figure it out from the tweets or images.

There's switching (apparently freely) between fighter plane and robot form, power-ups, different weapon types, very good-looking backgrounds...and I'm not seeing any flicker there either, even in the busy parts of the video. All props to OverObj, but in a way this looks more impressive. And with those aforementioned features this looks to be more of a real proper game.

They say there's a playable and purchasable demo available at Digigame Expo 2023, held on November 12th. If anybody happens to be going there, I'll pay decent money for somebody to buy me a copy too.

[UglyJoe]

Wow, super-smooth frame rate.  Really impressive.

[Ghegs]

This article from TimeExtension reveals the game's name to be Chouyoku Senki Estique, who's behind it, and other cool stuff.

[P]

Oh big names!
Takayuki Hirono, Compile programmer of Aleste, Zanac and Guardic Gaiden! The man behind Golvellius and a Compile artist!

Yeah it looks kinda 16-bit for an 8-bit game. Transforming the ship to a robot reminds me of Thexder, though the producer of that (Game Arts) have already passed.

I love it when old veterans makes a game for these old systems with modern tools (that I'm using myself). I saw a video where it looked like one of the Dragon Quest programmers were using Mesen for debugging.