In Darius Gaiden we are fed a pretty diverse bunch of marine life. You have fishes, crustaceans, arthropods, mammals, extinct critters, sea anemones, seahorses and a jellyfish. Curious Chandelier happens to supply us with the last of these. At the end of a lava-filled, belly-of-the-planet stage, this fine fellow rather spectacularly rises out of the lava (animation to come) and
fixes you with his Eye. The Eye of Belser. Oooh.
Curious Chandelier warming up. Nothing too hairy yet.
Tips:Curious Chandelier is a sort of three-tiered boss, with lethality that increases as you go up. He first fires some rather desultory chaingun fire in straight lines from the middle tier of thingies to warm up. His eye then sends out a crosshair towards you, and he then fires exploding shots at you. The classical way to avoid this is simply to move ahead of it (as you can see above) and get a nice arc of fireballs. You don't need to move so extensively, however. The Eye, understandably, isn't too happy that you withstood this attack, so now, he fires a purple beam at you, which can again be avoided the same way. Since it's a continuous beam, you will have to move across the screen and over his head. The second tier of thingies then fire ricoche lasers. Whee. This loops around for a while.
Off come the kid gloves.
Eventually, when our dear friend is pissed enough and has taken his share of damage, his lowest tier (which was harmless except as a physical hindrance) blows off (instead of being merely jettisoned, thank God) and thingies above them try to RAM you! Watch out! They are, of course, destructible. It's the first few rams that are dangerous. After you've blown a few off, the attacks become more manageable, until they're all gone. He then uses another stock attack, the attack of Summon Thingy. His are little toothed wheels which shoot out needle lasers. They're not the nastiest in the world, but are large in number and don't blow up at the first shot.
And again.
He then fires a rather pedestrian three-bullet stream. Not bad, until the crosshair comes out again. This time you lack the space to fly across his head and make a nice arc of explosions. A vague circular motion, or judicious weaving will have to do here. When he's realised this won't do, Curious Chandelier unleashes his second truly evil attack. It begins with the purple beam he used before, but then dig this: immediately after these are fired, he fires a sweeping beam that travels in the direction opposite to which he fired the previous beams. So if you moved clockwise to avoid the first beams, this one will take you from behind if you don't move back too quickly. You're likely to get sandwiched between beams here. He then fires some more thingies and cycles. Grit your teeth especially for the last attack, and finally:
Not quite bad. Certainly quite manageable for a final Gaiden boss! The ending is one which will make you tear your hair out:
Gaah, that IS cheap. Cheap cheap cheap cheap.
Rating:
Colour Scheme:
87%
Design:
94%
Attacks:
93%
Name:
88%
Real-Life Inspiration: The shrimp jellyfish.
Useless But Fun Trivia: Kurabar, one of the art designers, says on his web page (check out the Links section for direction) that Curious Chandelier was supposed to have been called Shampoo Hat. Alas, we missed much.
