It's not good...but it's hardly the worst shooter ever made. Of shooters in
general at the time, I did dislike the tendency for developers to increase the
speed of objects coming at you in order to make games more difficult. I
understand that learning patterns is part of the process in mastering shooters,
but some older games pummel you unmercifully at the very start of a level.
Luckily, technology got better, and developers concentrated on other aspects of
gameplay over the "30 little speedy objects converging on your position"
paradigm of many late 80s/early 90s shooters. However, we've now kind of
flip-flopped and we now have the "bullet hell" brand of shooter favored by developers
like Takumi and Cave. It's certainly no better than the previously mentioned
style, and, depending on the difficulty level you have a game set at, it may be
even more difficult to survive for long periods of time, depending entirely on
the percentage of the screen which is covered in things that can kill you. I
really wish that more companies would develop straightforward shooters, ones
without gimmicks and other nonsense to make them harder (or odder) than they
really should be. However, without things to distinguish them, I doubt that
anyone, save the small core base of shooter fans, would care to play a normal,
simple shooter. It's always been asserted that some shooters are alike and
indistinguishable from others. While that's true to a large degree, that same can
be more than said for the favorite genres of the idiots which seems to always
argue that point...like FPSs, sports games, racing games, and those crappy
"soldier/special ops" games which have been flooding the market. That said,
it's entirely possible that if I had to choose between a game like Deep Blue
(which I do own, by the way) and one of the more popular games nowadays, I'd go
with Deep Blue.