Blast Wind (Saturn)

 I went into this game with high expectations, coming as it does from Technosoft, makers of Thunder Force IV, a strong candidate for the title of best shooting game on the Mega Drive, a system with an absurd amount of high quality shooting games. While it doesn't live up to its legendary forebear, it's still an excellent game.

 

It's a vertically scrolling shooter that's surprisingly simple for the time it came out: there's no elaborate scoring system like you'd see in Cave's contemporary output, nore are there the many different playable craft with multiple attack options like you'd see in Psikyo's games. You just get one ship, with two kinds of normal shot (a powerful straight-ahead weapon, and a weaker, more spread out one), and the customary screen-clearing bombs. I wonder if this simplicity in an age when shooting games were going through a lot of sudden evolution is why the location tests for the unreleased arcade version failed? (Of course, I was emulating this game, and its arcade origins are so obvious that on more than one occasion I instinctively pressed the 5 key on my laptop, as if I was playing in MAME and needed to insert another virtual coin!)

 

That's not to say that Blast Wing doesn't have any new ideas, though. There's two big ones, the most noticable of which is the way every stage splits into two paths, chosen by pressing a button by nudging it with your ship. Though you go through the same stages no matter which way you go, there are two different boss fights for each stage, and the paths do vary in difficulty enough that beginner players would do well to learn what effect pressing the button or not has on their chances of survival. (And of course, advanced players will want to try their hand at playing through both versions of each stage no matter what).

 

The other big idea is one that seems inconsequential when you first encounter it, but turns out to be both interesting and important as you play the game more. When you collect a power up, as well as the usual effect, you also get a couple of seconds of invincibility, as well as a big powerful lightning attack that extends from your ship horizontally and cancels enemy bullets, as well as one-shotting most regular foes and dealing massive damage to bosses. It not only encourages players to chase power ups further up the screen to where the enemies are (as opposed to timidly waiting near the bottom for the power ups to come to them), but it also introduces a strategic element regarding when to collect them: if a couple of power ups appear on an empty screen, do you collect them there and then while the coast is clear, or wait until enemies appear so you can quickly wipe them out with the lightning?

 

It would be remiss to talk about a Technosoft game without mentioning how it looks and sounds, and luckily, their reputation is untarnished in Blast Wind. The backgrounds are really nice, full of cool little details. I really love stage two in particular, which takes place high above a huge city, which is far below in the background, with a much closer layer showing various industrial-looking platforms and walkways of some kind, and there's tiny little pixel people walking around them! There's lots of little details like that that make it feel more like you're flying over an actual world and add a lot to the atmosphere. The soundtrack is also really cool. Not as good as the one in TFIV, but again, that's one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time, and an absurdly high bar to clear. But yeah, the music's good. (I'm not good at talking about music though!)

 

Obviously, this is yet another Saturn game that had a low print run and fetches ludicrously high prices online. Hopefully someday, SEGA will start rereleasing Saturn games on modern consoles, but until they do, Blast Wind is definitely one that deserves a permanent place in you SSF/YabaSanshiro disc images folder.

Nekoba Rock n Roll (PC)

 Nekoba, in case you're wondering, is short for "Neko Bazooka", and in this game you play as a badly-drawn cat with a bazooka, shooting various weird things in at least three kinds of stages (I haven't completed the game yet, maybe more appear later?). There's platform stages, driving stages, and helicopter stages.

 

The platform stages are the most numerous, and they take place in closed-off areas where you have to kill all the bosses that appear within the time limit (and obviously, without getting killed yourself). The driving stages see you stand on the back of a pickup truck shooting a cop cars and busses until a boss appears for you to kill, and the helicopter stages are short, but somewhat traditional horizontally-scrolling shooting stages.

 

This is a game that really feels like what I think of regarding the term "indie": it seems to have been made by one person, who clearly had ideas about the game they wanted to make, and let nothing stand in their way. The art is wildly inconsistent, with high detailed artwork of anime girls talking to crudely-drawn blobs in the cutscenes, and all the enemies in the stages are a seemingly random assortment of more crudely-drawn animals, parodies of existing characters (including the very brave inclusion of what appears to just be a distorted low resolution piece of official mickey mouse art), and just strange monster things. All this, and a lot of the music is actually vocal songs!

 

Is it actually fun to play, though? Yes! It's definitely not a tightly-crafted experience, but each stage is only a couple of minutes long, and they're some incredibly frantic minutes with enemies and bullets all over the place. The difficulty is just right, too, as it never feels like a tedious cakewalk, or a punishing slog. Likewise, the enemies all take just enough punishment to make them satisfying kills without feeling like damage sponges. Come to think of it, maybe this is a tightly-crafted experience, merely disguised as a demented piece of outsider art?

 

Anyway, Nekoba Rock n Roll is interesting, fun, unique and also very very cheap. So you should probably go and buy it!

Snail World (PC)

 Snail World is a cute little shooting game, and the developer's page for it on itchio states "This game is in Japanese, but if you know the Fantasy Zone, you should be able to play it without any problems", which is true, as this is very much a Fantasy Zone fangame, mechanically speaking, at least. Furthermore, even that polite warning is more that is really necessary, since the intro and ending scenes, as well as the item shop are all bilingual. 

 

It's interesting, after Near Fantasy Space, to see another Fantasy Zone fangame that takes a completely different approach to the source material. While Near Fantasy Space paid homage to various other shooting games from the history of the genre, re-imagining each of them as Fantasy Zone stages, Snail World is totally its own thing, aesthetically speaking. It uses only four colours throughout the entire game, and as a result, has a very clean, stylish look to it. 

 

Snail World is an excellent and lovingly-crafted game in every respect, and the only real criticism that can be levelled at it is that it's incredibly easy: I'm not even particuarly good at shooting games (as much as I love them), and I managed to get the one credit clear on my first time playing. However, I don't think this really is a criticism in this case, because I feel like Snail World was created as a kind of playable art piece, to showcase the creator's pixel art and music. 

 

A deliberate prioritisation of aesthetics, then. And judging the gme on its aesthetics can only honestly be done positively: it's clear the developer had a vision, and realised it perfectly, and it all looks and sounds great. There isn't really much more to say on this game, other than that it's free, so if it sounds interesting to you, go and get it. It's definitely made me curious about the developer's other works, so I'll be looking into those at some point, too!

Sispri Gauntlet (PC)

 Remember my review of Gal Pani X a few months ago, when I mentioned that I'd been unable to find a copy of this game? Well, thanks to the help of a good friend, I managed to get ahold of it, and it was worth the effort! It's a fangame based on a series of novels and a dating simulator called Sister Princess, with a premise so creepy that I'll let you go and look it up yourselves if you want to know, but luckily that doesn't really affect this game.

 

The title spells out the basic premise, really: it's Sister Princess characters, in a Gauntlet=style game. That's Gauntlet the old maze shooting game, not just the general concept of gauntlets. Of course, just like how D5 gave the Gals Panic games a boost of adrenaline with Gal Pani X, Sispri Gauntlet does the same to Gauntlet. The easy way of describing it would be to say that it's an enemy hell game. THere are constantly thick hordes of enemies assailing you from all directions, spawning out of (thankfully destructible) generators. So your task is to manage the flow of these enemies and get to the end of the stage, as well as finding keycards to open doors along the way.

 

There's various other complications too, like giant robots that walk around placing more generators, barricades that act like walls that block movement and you shots, but allow enemy shots to pass through, and the most panic-inducing of all: the time limit. Considering the amount of enemies you have to fight, the time limit is incredibly tight, and once it runs out, you're quickly murdered by an endless swarm of tiny red enemies that spawn everywhere in increasing numbers until you're dead.

 

One thing I didn't like is the way you use your super weapon: rather than being assigned a button of its own, you're supposed to tap a direction and the shoot button together to use it, though it's very unreliable and only registers about a third of the time. Also, it's only limited in that it takes a couple of seconds to regarge after use, announcing that it's ready with the "OK" sound effect from Giga Wing, oddly. This is a relatively small complaint, though, and overall, I think this is an excellent game. It might seem overwhelmingly difficult at first (and even after a couple of hours' play, I've only managed to get as far as the third stage), but with some perseverance and a little bit of strategic thinking, you'll get into the swing of it, and realise that stemming the flow of enemies and avoiding their bullets isn't as impossible as it first seems. If you can find a copy, I definitely recommend playing Sispri Gauntlet.

Rainbow Cotton (Dreamcast)

 This is a game I somehow only recently got around to, despite having been meaning to play it for almost twenty years! Back in the Dreamcast's original heyday, it was one of the Japan-only titles I really wanted to try out. Then when Dreamcast emulation first came about years later, this game was just a little too much for my computer at the time to handle. A few more years (and a couple of dead laptops) later still, and an English translation patch, that even subtitles the FMV cutscenes gets released, and I finally got around to playing it.

 

The game is, of course, part of the long-running Cotton series of shooting games, and more specifically it's a sequel to the Mega Drive game Panorama Cotton, both games being Space Harrier clones, rather than the horizontally scrolling 2D shooting games more typical of the series. The first thing that'll hit you about the game once you start playing is how nice it looks. It's definitely among the best-looking games in the whole Dreamcast library! There's an incredible use of colour, and everything looks like an amazing fairytale dreamworld, almost as if they'd made a shooting spin-off from NiGHTs into Dreams. If I had played the game around the time of its release in early 2000, I don't think I would have ever seen anything like it before!

 

Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't live up to the visuals. It's just got lots of tiny little faults that all add up. Cotton herself gets in the way of where you're aiming and blocks your view of incoming enemy shots, too. You have a health bar instead of lives, and I don't think there's enough feedback when you get it, either. So if you don't pay attention to your health bar, you'll suddenly die without even realising you'd taken a lot of hits. None of these things is game-breaking on its own, and even added up, they don't make the game a bad one, but they are annoying, and it feels so close to being an actual good game, rather than one that's merely okay.

 

I think I can recommend this game conditionally. If, like me, you've been curious about it for a long time, then now is a good time to seek it out. Though the plot, as revealed by the subtitled cutscenes isn't really anything particualrly special, the whole experience of the excellent graphics and those turn-of-the-century animated FMVs does feel like something I would have loved back then, so there's a kind of retroactive enjoyment there. You should probably just emulate it, though, since the prices legitimate copies fetch these days are, just like its Mega Drive forebear, ludicrous.

Commando Steel Disaster (DS)

 Okay, so you might notice that all of the screenshots for this reciew are of the game's first stage, and usually, I wouldn't review a game if that's all I could see of it, but this is a special case. Most of my time playing this game was the DSiWare version which I have on my n3DS. I don't have any way of taking screenshots of DSiWare games, though, but I knew the game was released as a regular DS cartridge, so I played that too, for screenshotting purposes. It turns out, the two versions aren't the same!

 

The basic core of the game is the same, of course: it's a pretty decent Metal Slug clone. You go through stages, shooting lots of guys, and occasionally robots and tanks and helicopters. There's a whole bunch of temporary power-up weapons, destructible parts of the stages with hidden items, and most other Metal Slug things. Except that vehicles only appear in special seperate substages, not as thing you can just climb aboard in the regular stages. It's pretty good. Obviously nowhere near as good as the first few Metal Slugs, but maybe in the same league as the later entries.

 

The differences between the two versions are all related to difficulty. The stages in the cartridge version are a lot longer, to the extent that entire sections are removed from the digital version. Of course, I've only seen the first stage of the cartridge version, but the first stage is made up of three sections: one on a jetbike in a forest, one outside in the snow, and another inside an underground military base. The digital version of the first stage, meanwhile, and the indoors section is slightly truncated, as well as the larger gatekeeper enemies having significantly less HP. The enemies in the digital version generally have less HP, and they inflict less damage on the player, too.

 

Which one is better? To be honest, there's no perfect version. The cartridge version is a bit of a chore: I could definitely overlook the difficulty if the stages were shorter, and the bigger enemies didn't feel like such bullet sponges, and while I definitely prefer the digital version's faster pace, it also feels like there's no challenge at all, and most of the times I've played it, I've actually gotten bored and stopped playing the game long before I came close to dying. 

 

So I guess the only conclusion is that Commando: Steel Disaster is a game with two different versions on the same platform, both of which are terribly flawed, in almost completely opposite ways. Just play Metal Slug X instead, is the best advice I can give here.

Curiosities #20 - Wakusei Aton Gaiden (Famicom Disk System)

 The circumstances of this game's creation are somewhat similr to the MSX game The Komainu Quest, which I reviewed back in Small Games Vol. 5, in that it was created by a government agency. This time though, it's the National Tax Agency of Japan, and the aim here isn't promotional, it's educational, aiming to teach Japanese citizens of the 1980s correct tax-paying procedures.

 

It takes the form of a simple vertically-scrolling shooting game with occasional quiz segments. The quiz segments are all in Japanese, and presumably, all the questions are about Japanese tax laws in the 1980s, so I'm going to assume nobody is ever going to bother translating this game, and even if they did, most playrs wouldn't get the answers right without emplying a lot of trial and error anyway. That is, unless a passionate and very competitive high score scene suddenly springs up around the game, since correct answers score points (I managed to get a few through sheer luck).

 

The shooting parts are very simple, you just fly upwards, and every few seconds, a couple of enemies fly down from the top of the screen for you to shoot. Now and then a friendly ship will fly up from the bottom of the screen, and these act like power ups if you touch them, either killing all present enemies, increasing your speed and the power of your guns, or latching onto the front of your ship and acting as a temporary shield. That last one seems the most pointless, thank's to the game's biggest flaw: there's no real lose condition. Getting hit just reduces your speed and firepower, and you can otherwise get hit as much as you like without consequence. 

 

As a result, the only real "game" here is to try and get the highest score before it ends, by shooting every enemy and answering every question correctly. With that in mind, I can't really recommend Wakusei Aton Gaiden to anyone except those curious to see a government-commissioned shooting game about taxes.

Near Fantasy Space (PC)

 Now, I'm sure you'll all take one look at these screenshots and you'll instantly know one thing: this is a Fantasy Zone fangame. And while that's an accurate assesment, it's also an incomplete one! Because Near Fantasy Space might take most of its aesthetic and mechanical inspiration from SEGA's pschedelic shooting game series, it uses them as a skeleton to pay homage to a whole bunch of other shooting games too! How efficient!

 

Now, I'm going to have to be honest with you all here: on this blog, I've always insisted on only using my own screenshots to illustrate my reviews. Unfortunately, Near Fantasy Space is one of those cases where that stubborn adherence to principles has somewhat limited my capacity to show all the cool stuff a game has to offer. So while I can show you the first three stages, which pay homage to Ikaruga, Battle Garegga, and R-Type respectively, you'll have to go elsewhere to see the later stages homaging the likes of Darius, Gradius, Fantasy Zone itself, and more. Sorry.

 

Other than the stages themselves, more little treats are on offer in the super-cute weapon shop screen, which is made to look like a modern shopping website, compllete with star ratings on each item and some recommendations right at the bottom. Furthermore, the rapid fire item looks just like the Rapid Fire Unit peripheral that was released for the Master System!

 

The most frustrating thing about the game's difficulty is how uneven it is. The stages themselves are actually pretty easy, and if you're not totally useless at shooting games, they shouldn't really offer you any trouble. The bossfights, by contrast, are harrowing ordeals. The bosses take an incredible amount of punishment before going down, and they definitely aren't shy about dishing it out, either. I almost wrote this game off, as I was having such a hard time getting past the second stage's boss, and I didn't want to post a review that only had sreenshots of two stages, but after about an hour of repeated failure, I eventually got past it. I will say this though: seeing how each new stage pays homeage to its inspiration is a pretty nice reward for getting through each bossfight.

 

Near Fantasy Space is a game that was clearly made with a lot of love, and like the X68000 game Scorpius that I reviewed a few years ago, is living proof of the fact that old-style shooting games are significantly more difficult than modern danmaku-style games. You can get it pretty cheaply online if you don't want to seek out a physical copy, and if you have the fortitude for a game with such a small amount of mercy, then I recommend you do so.

Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird GB (Game Boy)

So, I was attracted to this game due to it being a vertically-scrolling shooting game on the Game Boy, which is pretty unusual. The Game Boy does have some surprisingly great shooters, of course, but they tend to scroll horizontally, like Nemesis II, for example. It's also interesting because instead of a ship flying up the screen, you're piloting a giant robot, walking up the screen.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do a very good job of representing vertical shooting games on the Game Boy, on account of it being rubbish. The problem is not just that it's easy, but it's also boring. You trudge up the stages, easily killing the occasional enemies (that mostly don't even really look like anything besides abstract shapes). You can take eight hits before getting a game over, but after you've taken one or two, you can rely on a nice convenient power-up to come along and restore you back to full health.

As a result, I completed Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird the first time I played it. Then I completed it again to take screenshots for this review. The thing is, before you start playing, there's a character select screen, with two characters to pick from, and the title "select your level". Whichever you pick, there doesn't appear to be no difference at all, either in the character you're controlling or in the difficulty of the stages. Mysterious. Either way, the game's about ten minutes long, and they aren't even ten particularly exciting minutes.

I don't recommend wasting any time on this game, unless you really need to play every Game Boy shooting game, or if you're completely obsessed with the anime on which its based and need to experience everything to do with it. Otherwise, don't bother.

Pleasure Hearts (MSX)

Pleasure Hearts is one of the early works of M-Kai, a developer who would go onto later fame through his Wonderswan game Judgement Silversword, and even later than that, the XBox 360's Eschatos. Though it's an early work, you can already see that he's a developer with plenty of ability in both programming and game design. In fact, this might be the best-looking game on the MSX (discounting laserdisc games, of course), with all kinds of animation and scrolling tricks in effect.

Luckily, it also plays really well. Though it might look like an old-fashioned horizontal STG, it actually occupies a space in between old-fashioned games like Gradius and the like, and faster danmaku-style games, which had already been populatr in arcades for a few years by the time of Pleasure Hearts' release in 1999. Bullet patterns are mostly confined to boss fights, though, with the stages having large crowds of small enemies each firing individual bullets directly at you, often at different speeds. This is a really strange paragraph to read, isn't it? Sorry about that.

Basically, it's a fast and fun and very high quality game. Interestingly, for a game on an 8-bit system, the scores go really high, really quickly, and score growth seems to be exponential: I tend to hit the one billion mark around the start of stage four, and only a stage later, I'm already at three billion! I'm not totally certain on this, but there is a bullet graze counter among the various other stats and meters at the top of the screen, and I think this acts as a multiplier on the points diamonds that are dropped by some enemies, and which your bombs turn bullets into. Like I said, I'm not 100% certain of that theory, though.

There's even some kind of plot in the game, as evidenced in the optional prologue stage, which sees a fully-powered up ship with a massive score at the end of some grand adventure getting betrayed by its allies and ultimately destroyed by a giant dragon. Presumably, then, the game's plot is about seeking revenge on the traitors and their dragon? I'm only guessing, of course. There's no text or anything as far as I can tell, and it would presumably be in Japanese anyway, even if there was.

I could keep writing about how great this game is, but if I did, it really would be just that: a stream of compliments directed at every aspect of the game. Obviously, I strongly recommend that you go and play this game as soon as possible. It's very easily available online, since M-Kai himself released it and his other MSX games as freeware back in 2009, so go and find it, load it up in your MSX emulator of choice, and have a great time!

Geograph Seal (X68000)

To be honest, I should really have written about this game years and years ago, and it barely even counts as obscure anymore: along with Cho Ren Sha 68k, this is easily one of the best-known X68000 games, and since Cho Ren Sha has a Windows port, it's definitely the best-known X68000 exclusive. Of course, for a lot of people, just being an X68000 exclusive alone is enough to be considered obscure, so let's just get on with it, eh?

Now, the most obvious thing to say about this game is that it's by the developers of the much-loved Playstation series Jumping Flash, and it acts very much as a genetic forebear to those games, too. It's got similar weapons, the same super-high triple jump, even some of the same fonts are used in its GUI. While those more famous games focussed heavily on the dizzying heights available to the new world of 3D platforming, Geograph Seal is more of a straight first person shooter, where you also happen to have the ability to jump really high. This makes sense, though, as the short draw distance (yes, even shorter than Jumping Flash!) means that any platforming would have been unfair and confusing.

Draw distance aside, it's an incredible-looking game. Seeing it in motion, it's hard to believe it's running on a 16-bit machine from the eighties. Pretty much everything is a 3D model, when they could just as easily have used sprites for the enemies and items, it all moves a lot more smoothly than its console contemporaries like Starwing or Virtua Racing, and even though none of the models are textured, the background is, and even that small thing adds a lot to how the game looks. I remember when I first played this, back on my first PC, on a much earlier version of the emulator xm6, and the backgound images were plain black, and the models weren't even filled in, so it was wireframe on a black background, with no GUI. Even then, it looked pretty good, but now that we can see the game in its full glory, it's on the level of some of the 3D arcade games Namco were putting out in the early nineties, like Cyber Sled and Starblade.

Geograph Seal isn't just a game that was ahead of its time technologically: it's clear that the devs at Exact had a clear view of the direction in which action games were going to go over the following few years, and they were right. I don't know what the reaction to it was on release, but I can only assume that people must have been blown away by a fast, exciting, full 3D game of this quality. It's definitely a game you could have looked at in 1994, and said "this is the future".

I don't really think there's much more for me to say about this game. Yes, you should definitely play it if you haven't already. It's excellent.