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.

[Ghegs]

https://twitter.com/Broke_Studio/status/1783834134026359159

Apparently Broke Studio will be handling the game's publishing for both NES and Famicom, so it should be extremely easy for us westerners to get our hands on this one. No need to jump through hoops like with some other recent Famicom homebrews.