V-V
V-Five / Grind Stormer
V-V (AKA: V-Five, also known as: Grind Stormer) is a vertical shooting game developed and published by Toaplan in 1993. It was also ported to the Sega Genesis, under the title Grind Stormer. The game was programmed by Tsuneki Ikeda, who moved on to CAVE after the closure of Toaplan, and it is one of the last two games made by the company. Alongside Batsugun and DonPachi, it is an early progenitor of the bullet hell sub-genre of shooting games, with bullet amounts in later stages of the game amounting to between 70-80 on screen at once. It is considered a "spiritual successor" to Toaplan's earlier game, Slap Fight, due to similar gameplay mechanics.
V-V is unique among vertical shmups in the use of a power-up system inspired by Gradius, where the player collects diamond-shaped icons and presses a button to activate specific power-ups; Grind Stormer diverges from this power-up system and instead makes powerups random pick-ups that you collect, more akin to a more traditional shooter, and gives the player Bomb stocks that work much like bombs in other games. The Sega Genesis port released in North America includes an option to switch between "Grind Stormer" and "V-Five" mode in the Options menu.
The plot is about an insanely hard video game called V-Five, released in the year 2210, which abducts gamers and makes them hopelessly addicted to the game, unable to stop playing it. The player is a government agent sent to investigate and beat the game in order to free its victims from its clutches.
References
- Primary info provided by CHA-STG
