XBLA doubleshot: Rez and Ikaruga

Rarely is a game so popular that it successfully finds a second life on another console. Even rarer does that game surpasses the original. Yet this was the case not once, but twice this winter with the Xbox Live Arcade releases of Rez and Ikaruga, two seminal Japanese shooters that are finally available on a wide scale to American audiences.

Rez, the synesthetic rail shooter conceptualized and developed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi (you may be familiar with some of his more recent work, such as the puzzle classic Lumines), puts the player in the role of a hacker shooting his way through a computer system to access the main AI. The game’s selling points upon its original release in 2001 were a combination of trippy visuals and sounds, the latter of which are augmented as the player shoots the myriad enemies that stand in the way. The game gained even more notoriety following its release for the PS2 in Japan, when a special "trance vibrator" was included to expand the synesthesia element of the game to include touch and provide female gamers with something to do while their boyfriends marathon the game. Rez is meant to be played in a dark room with the speakers blaring and is the closest thing most gamers will find to an acid trip short.

Separated at birth from the rail shooter is the bullet hell shooter, of which Ikugara is an excellent example. Ikaruga was originally developed for the arcade before being ported to the Dreamcast, where it found its widest audience (although ports for the Gamecube……