It’s been a long time coming, but at last it’s time for Ikaruga to land on our collective 360 dashboards. Those with particularly sharp memories will no doubt recall that I have already given my thoughts on the absolutely spiffing GameCube iteration that practically glued my eyeballs to my telly a good few years ago. It’s a little hard to come by without spending over £30 on eBay these days, so for 800 of your Microsoft Points (about £6 or so, then) you can now see what all the fuss is about for yourselves.

Obviously this is Ikaruga with a bit of the ol’ spit and polish, and it looks utterly lovely. Those with proper HD tellies will also have the option to turn them on their side (if they can – I wouldn’t unless it was LCD personally) and play the game in the proper aspect ratio that it was intended to. With white and black bullets pinging around and colourful explosions filling the screen, it’s quite easy for anyone in eyeshot to be completely captivated by the whole thing. The GameCube version itself was rather pretty, but with the HD makeover and a bit of tweaking it truly looks gorgeous.

Beneath the facelift it’s still the same addictive stuff, being a like-for-like representation of previous versions. The general idea is that you control a ship that can change polarity at the press of a button, your task being to shoot enemies and dodge bullets (well, duh). The main hook with Ikaruga is that the enemies also come in black or white flavour, and whilst shooting opposing polarities means you deal double damage it also puts you at risk of being hit by their bullets, which kill you. Bullets of a matching polarity can be absorbed by your ship and stored up for a powerful mega-shot that’ll wipe out pretty much anything on the screen.

This, as you can imagine, leads to all sorts of colour-swapping logistical nightmares at first. As with any shooter of this ilk there’s always a right and wrong way to do things to a degree, but half the fun is heading through each level and working out everything for yourself. There’s the added fun of trying to shoot enemies of matching colours in groups of three to add to your chain score and tot up huge bonus totals, leaving you with another tactical element to consider. For such a simple premise it’s a deliciously deep experience, and watching a master at work (such as this rather insane effort) is poetry in motion.

There are five levels to work your way through, and by lord will it take you a good while to get through them (unless you’re some kind of ninja shooter, that is). Whilst the first stage is somewhat gentle after a little practice, later stages will gleefully shoot black and white ribbons and dots at you quicker than you can perceivably think about them, leading to all sorts of one-more-try antics as you try that little bit harder to concentrate and navigate your way through. It gets strangely hypnotic and whole hours can literally just zoom past without you even realising, which is a sure sign of a game worth its salt.

Other than the visuals, there are little changes to the original versions save for a bit of tidying up on the menu system and the restoration of the game’s ‘story’ via couple of rather odd text introductions to the levels, all of which make little sense and are rather curiously worded. There’s the promise of Xbox Live multiplayer larks (we were not able to test this on the version we played, sadly) as well as local two-player fun, the option to upload replays to Xbox Live for people to stare in disbelief at your awesome skill (or not, in my case) and, of course, leader boards for the full arcade mode and individual stages.

Playing Omega Five last week really got the shooter bug in me going again, although Ikaruga is on a different plane to that altogether. In two recent online features run by respected gaming websites I can’t be bothered to mention by name, Treasure’s colour-changing masterpiece was ranked second and third respectively in the all-time top shoot-‘em’up lists. Having spent so long on it that I feel as if I am constantly having a migraine with silhouette dots floating across my screen as I type, I verily agree. With it now being released onto a platform with a huge user base and at a cheap-as-chips price, there’s no excuse for everyone out there not to find this out for themselves.