GunMaster (Arcade)

As promised in my Dharma Doujou post, I'm doing another post on an arcade game by the little-known company Metro. This time it's a platform shooting game, heavily influenced by Gunstar Heroes.

I use the more generous "influenced by" rather than "ripped off" because while GunMaster does have a lot in common with Treasure's masterpiece, it also adds a lot of it's own ingredients, the most notewothy of which being the fighting game-esque special moves the player can execute. Most of these moves are listed in the game's attract mode sequence, except one move, referred to as "BLOODY DANCE". I haven't managed to figure out this move myself (having done so with all the others, as being the impatient person I am, I didn't bother watching the attract mode until I'd already played the game a few times), but according to internet hearsay, the commands for it are revealed during the end credits.
The game itself sees the player going from stage to stage with each stage being a few screens wide and being taken up almost entirely with a boss fight, a la Alien Soldier (yes, another Treasure game, though in this case
GunMaster predates it by about a year).
I did actually intend to throw away my principles and credit feed to the end to take a screenshot of that elusive move for my precious readers, but unfortunately, the game's emulation in MAME has one small, but fatal flaw: while playing, it might at some random point, for no obvious reason, freeze.
But anyway, you can still play it to see what it's like, and it doesn't freeze every time, nor does any specific

in-game situation seem to trigger the bug, so you might make it all the way through if you're lucky! Plus, even if you're not, you can choose the order in which to tackle the stages (except for the final stage and an easy introductory stage), so you can still see a lot of the game. You'll definitely have to credit feed, though. That's the biggest flaw of the game itself: the unfair difficulty. A lot of the bosses have attacks that are impossible (or at least very close to impossible) to avoid. This wouldn't be so bad is the player had some kind of defensive maneouver, like Alien Soldier's Counter Force, or even just something as simple as a block button would have made fiinishing the game a significantly more realisitc prospect.
As for Metro, while trying to find more information on this game, I actually stumbled across their official website, which is still active, as is the company itself. They mostly seem to make licenced shovelware, as well as a few MMOs and even a couple of entries in the Simple series.