"No one can stop me from destroying the Great Machine and paving the way for the armies of Chaos. No one, not even skinny, loud-mouthed girls with big guns."
— Terminus
A Shoot 'em Up released in 1997 on Mac and in 1998 on Windows, battle-girl is a loving homage to arcade classics like Defender, Sinistar, and Robotron. Players pilot battle-girl's Soyuz 1183-A Attack Craft against the forces of Terminus, Weapon of Chaos.
James "Kibo" Parry once held the game's world high score
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It is now Abandonware, and can be found here.
:: battle-girl's tropes ::
- all lowercase letters: The title is always written this way, as is the character's name.
- Ancient Order of Protectors: For millennia prior to the game, priests have guarded the hibernating battle-girl.
- Animesque: Done as a stylistic choice to give it a very cyberpunk feel.
- Attack Its Weak Point: If Terminus manages to reprogram four function pods, he'll enter the program to fight you directly. Kicking him out requires shooting him five times in the face.
- Cosmic Keystone: The Great Machine, "source of cosmic order and enforcer of natural law," which sits at the center of the universe.
- Cyberpunk Is Techno: Your struggles inside the Machine are set to a sampling of classic MOD beats.
- Enemy-Detecting Radar: Arrows point to pods under attack, while less prominent indicators point to programmers lurking offscreen.
- Every 10,000 Points: Extra Lives are bestowed at 50,000, 150,000, 300,000, 600,000, 1,000,000, 1,500,000, and every million points thereafter.
- Fiery Redhead: battle-girl.
- Foreign-Looking Font: The title lettering looks like English filtered through Japanese.
- Generic Doomsday Villain: Terminus wants to replace order with chaos. That's all there is to him.
- Hack Your Enemy: Your objective is to stop Terminus' programmers from hacking function pods. You yourself have no ability to hack, only blast.
- Idle Animation: battle-girl taps her foot on the level select screen.
- I Shall Taunt YouTerminus: You can't save them all!
- Life Meter: It starts out red at 100%, and shades toward yellow as you lose health.
- Mercy Invincibility
- Personality Blood Types: battle-girl's is unsurprisingly B: strong, wild, and unforgiving.
- Power-Up: Weapons, energy orbs, and "power capsules".
- Screen Shake: The camera bucks when you collide with an agent of Terminus.