Cave releases second iPhone shmup

Cult Japanese developer Cave has published its second game on Apple’s App Store.

Launched overnight, Dodonpachi Resurrection is the first home version of arcade hit DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu and offers Cave’s trademark ‘bullet-hell’ gameplay. It includes both the original arcade version of the game and an adapted iPhone interpretation.

The game is currently available for 2.99 though that price will rise to 5.49 after the weekend. It follows the release of Espgaluda II on iPhone earlier this year. Both games are only compatible with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and the latest iPod Touches.

Cave has become somewhat of an Xbox 360 devotee in its home land of Japan, releasing a number of shooters on the console including DeathSmiles, DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou Black Label, Mushihime-sama Futari 1.5 and Espgaluda II.

None of these have been released outside Japan, though the latter two titles were region-free to allow fanatics to import them and play them on their UK machines. Cave will be releasing Gunwange on Xbox Live Arcade in Europe later this year.

The most interesting thing about the release is that emerging digital retail models have provided Cave with an outlet to the Western market that the developer felt wasn’t possible through traditional publishing models.

We can see how you might think that the iPhone is an unlikely platform,” developer Tsuneki Ikeda and iPhone project producer Yukihiro Masaki told Develop in June. When we first started porting to the system, we spent a lot of time just seeing what we could do and how accurately we could reproduce the arcade game.

But it was within that process that we realised that we could achieve the level of reproduction and quality that we were after, and that’s one motivating factor for bringing Espgaluda II to iPhone.

Another reason is that the iPhone/iPod Touch game market is extremely active, and we wanted a worldwide audience to get to know and play Cave shooters. Both of these reasons led us to deciding that the iPhone/iPod touch was a platform on which we people around the world could easily enjoy our games.”