There is something in shmups that I call “bomb sense”. Every shmup I love has a common mechanic - smart bombs, a very limited-use item that clears the screen of bullets, deal moderate damage to everything and grant a period of invuln. Often they may have other properties, but this is the important part. Bomb economy is often punishingly strict - taking a hit with bombs in stock will reset the amount - in effective terms, you have just wasted X amount of them for the entire run. No pockets in a shroud.

In every situation, every pattern, every pinch and pin, the player evaluates how they feel at that moment against their game experience - to determine how likely they are to need a bomb, and to hover their finger over the bomb button exactly that much. If their bomb sense is good enough, the moment they feel that lapse, that twinge, that TERROR INSTINCT - a gap in sensation, a mistracked bullet, a mistimed dodge - the bomb may save them within a frame or two. To use either too many or too few bombs is what really kills you in these games - creating a constant mindgame against the self.

Bombs in Twinkle Star Sprites can slow the game to a crawl, which may help your opponent just as much as yourself. Bombs make space for strategy. Players may mentally commit to using a bomb ahead of time in problematic parts of the game - and over time, practice more at such parts to obviate the need for the bomb, freeing it up for later. In the face of a dazzlingly mechanically hard game is where resources and planning truly matter – we would not have to think about bombs at all if it was casually possible to blind clear every situation.

With bombs, the one-hit kills of shmups suddenly become much more accomodating than meets the eye. Three lives to start with, three bombs per life – add three or four bonus lives, a handful of bonus bombs, and we now have something like 30 “mistakes” where a bomb or life was consumed over the course of a run - this is astonishly forgiving, and can even compare favourably to games with fluid health systems. But, these are only available if we know and acknowledge our limits. I love bombs. Bombs are my favourite mechanic of all time.