Rictus Grin.
It started with Defender. Eugene Jarvis' dastardly shoot-'em-up was the first videogame to wear its difficulty on its sleeve, just as players would wear its mastery as a badge of honour following its October 1980 release. Defender divided gamers into two camps: those who played games for pleasure and those who played games for prestige. Soon after its release, it was taking 150 million quarters a week across the US from those hoping to bask in cathode ray kudos.
It's a tradition that Cave, Shinjuku's premier boutique shoot-'em-up developer, picked up 15 years later. The company's work with the Donpachi series established its own devilish sub-genre, 'bullet hell'. For years, Cave's precise, inimitable games have challenged the best arcade players to pick their way through squalls of pixel chaos. Those who manage to do so in a single credit are gods among men; their high scores are numerical read-outs of prescient hand-eye co-ordination and the ability to plot a route to victory through a curtain of pandemonium.
More recently, with the decline of the arcade, Cave has been attempting to find ways to serve a less twitch-proficient audience, both by way of its iPhone ports and this, the first of the company's arcade titles to be released in Europe in a box. Deathsmiles, which debuted in arcades in 2007, is a horizontal shoot 'em up that manages to serve both types of player that Defender split apart: those who play the game for pleasure and those who play it for prestige.
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