Project Minerva Professional (PS2)

It's odd that this game got a western release, since it's a weird kind of celebrity vehicle thing for Norika Fujiwara, an actress who isn't well-known in the west at all (the only thing that westerners might know on her IMDB page is the live action movie based on the comic Boys Over Flowers). Even more oddly, the game's opening credits list er as "Star and Planner", though I assume her role in planning was just agreeing to be in a game, and possibly having the enemies be robots because she didn't want to be seen as a bloodthirsty mercenary? Or maybe it really was a passion project for her, and she genuinely had a bunch of ideas for an action game in which she wanted to star?

If this game was made in the west, about a western model/actress/general celebrity, it'd probably be very different. Look at Kim Kardashian's game, for example: a phone game about fashion and fame and all that sort of thing. Project Minerva Professional, by contrast, is a military/sci-fi themed squad-based 3D shooter. Norika "plays" a woman named Alicia, who is the leader of a military task force charged with saving humanity from the evil robots manufactured by Minerva Corporation. This is done in a series of missions (I hear there's over a hundred, though I've only played through about six of them), with various typical squad shooter objectives: kill a number of enemies, plant bombs in certain locations, rescue the hostages, and so on.

Now, though I do think it's a bit of a shame that almost all modern 3D action games use a near-identical dual analogue control scheme, I think the fact that Project Minerva came out before that layout had been standardised is what really hurts it the most, more than the useless squad members running around like headless chickens, and more than the very simple (and Simple Series-esque) stage layouts and mission parameters. (Though it wasn't originally released as a Simple Series game, it really does feel like one, and actually got a rerelease a bit later as The Simple 2000 Ulitmate Series Vol. 23). Alicia is moved with the left stick, the right shoulder buttons are used for aiming your gun and looking through your binoculars, and the left shoulder buttons are used for centering the camera behind Alicia, which is the only direct control of the camera you get. Another typical (and hated) trait the game has in common with a lot of Simple Series games is the insane level of grinding. Weapons and armour are slowly made available in the shop, and once they're available, they still need to be bought, with insane prices that require several stages to be completed before they can be met.

You might wonder what the right analogue stick is doing, and it does nothing besides being a duplicate of the controls mapped to the d-pad, which are used for selecting and giving orders to your underlings. There's lots of other weird quirks in this game too, like how enemies don't appear on the radar unless you look at them through your binoculars and "mark" them, which has to be done for each enemy individually. You also have very little offence or defence at short ranges. There are some short range weapons, but they aren't great, and  you can't move and shoot at the same time: to shoot, you hold down R2 to look through your weapon's scope, aim with the left stick (so you can't move at the same time), and shoot with the square button. To make things worse, the direction you'll be looking in when you hold R2 isn't necessarily going to be the direction the camera is pointing in beforehand, making it very difficult to quickly aim and shoot at enemies. Unlike the clunkiness of Deep Water, this awkwardness doesn't add anything to the game, it is just annoying awkwardness.

Having said all that, there is some fun to be had in Project Minerva Professional. Since the late 90s, it's been a widely held opinion that there's a certain satisfying thrill to be had in shooting far away enemies through a scope, and that does still apply in this game, even through all the clunkiness of the controls and the weirdness of the camera. There's still dozens, and probably even hundreds of better games that offer the same thrill, though, so unless you really love the aesthetic of early PS2 games, you should just go for one of those over this one.

Devastator (Mega CD)

It might just be my imagination, but it seems like there's a disproportionally large amount of action games about giant robots on the Mega CD. Devastator is one of them, and it's also part of another sizable category of Mega CD games: anime licenses. It's based on a two episode OAV entitled D-1 Devastator, of which only one episode has ever been subbed into english, by the group ARR, who had an infuriating habit of subbing the first episodes of rare and interesting series, and then never going back to them. Of course, since this is a game on an early CD console, grainy clips from the anime play between stages, though the quality is far from being the worst on the system.

But anyway, Devastator is a combination platform game/horizontally-scrolling shooter, with each stage playing out as either one or the other. There's no half-measures, either, as the platform stages are intricate, and full of traps, while the shooting stages are fast, hectic and full of enemies and their bullets. I admit I wasn't expecting much from a Mega CD game licensed from a long-forgotten OAV and developed by Wolfteam, but Devastator was a really pleasant surprise.

I have no idea what the anime is about, but the developers haven't let it hamper them thematically in any way, as there's stages in cities, deserts, jungles, some kind of incredibly enormous space/hell mansion and so on. The monsters mostly seem to be the same for all the platform stages, though each has unique traps and other elements, while the enemies in the shooting stages seem to be different every time. The bosses in both types of stages are great, too, being massive, detailed sprites, with attack patterns that are fun to learn.

Not only does it play really well, with the difficulty level balanced just right, hard enough to be satisfying and easy enough to avoid frustration, but it also looks and sounds great. It's not just a case of a Mega Drive game being dumped onto CD so they could shoehorn in some FMVs, the Mega CD's strengths are really put on display here, with lots of colours, amazing CD quality music, and even the occasional bit of sprite scaling! (Sprite scaling is always very welcome on this blog.)

The Mega CD is a system with more hidden gems than most people think, and Devastator is definitely one of them. I definitely recommend giving it a try.

Retro Force (Playstation)

"Cultural appropriation" might be a bit strong for what Retro Force is, but it can't be denied that there is something at least a little annoying about the circumstances under which it was released. In the late 90s, unless you were able to import, you pretty much didn't get to play any home ports of arcade shooting games, and if you did, they were often insulting, mangled messes like the infamous Mobile Light Force, stripped of its character to make it "less Japanese", for some reason. It's in this climate that Retro Force, a vertically scrolleing shooter with a Wipeout/Jet Force Gemini-esque faux-Japanese aesthetic was released.

All this aside, is it actually a good game, though? No. The first and biggest problem you'll encounter is the controls: your ship doesn't stop moving until about a second after you stop pressing the d-pad. This alone is pretty unforgivable in a game and a genre that demands precision at all times. I guess that's why you have a pretty long health bar for each of your lives, and almost nofeedback on getting hit, making you into a kind of bullet-sponging ice hockey puck.

Another problem is that your weapons all feel incredibly weak, and power-ups are unbelievably rare: you don't see one until midway through the second stage. Speaking of stages, there's some odd choices in the game's visual design, like how the first stage is set in a pretty cool-looking futuristic city, while the next three stages are spent flying above boring, white ice fields.

I could keep going on and on about all the flaws this game has, and how it's just no fun to play at all, but that kind of negativity isn't very interesting, despite what thousands of squealing youtube critics would have you believe. I'll just say that it's a bad game, and there are many other, better shooters on the Playstation alone.

Ninja Emaki (Arcade)

Ninja Emaki (also known as Youma Ninpou Chou) is a 1986 entry into a now mostly dead shooting sub-genre: the Commando-style top-down walking shooters. Nowadays, it seems that vertically scrolling shooters have to either be more standard ship-style games with player's shots only going in one direction, or twin-stick shooters where the player's movement and firing directions are totally independent.

You play as a ninja in fuedal Japan who, in a mildly cliched story, goes off to rescue a princess who we see being carried off by a giant flying snake at the start of the game. You're armed with a crossbow as standard, and there's also magic scrolls that periodically appear, giving access upon collection to your choice of eight different offensive spells. The way this works is very versatile: once you collect and activate a scroll, the magic will work for twenty seconds, and during those twenty seconds, you can cycle through the different weapons as much as you like. They're all pretty different, too, having effects from a crashing wave that course up the screen destroying enemies, to a series of small whirlwinds that surround you, killing enemies that come near, to a simple power boost for your crossbow bolts.

What makes Ninja Emaki stand out from the pack (and believe it or not, there is something of a pack of ninja-themed scrolling shooters) is its slightly manic pace and structure. Though you start the game in the skies riding a cloud, each area you enter is different: you're riding a cloud, then you're running through a field, then you're on a boat, then fighting giant spiders in a graveyard, and so on. And I say "areas" rather than "stages" because there's never really a solid "end of the stage" like you'd expect in most games. Instead, you just travel up the screen, going from one situation to the next, the action never stopping for more than a second or two.

Though its qualities don't instantly jump out on first playing, Ninja Emaki is a fun, exciting game, and definitely worth your time. And if you find it too easy (which is definitely a possibility, as it's pretty generous with the extra lives), apparently the Japanese version is a lot harder, though I've not yet played it myself.

Curiosities Vol. 8 - Secret Shooting Games

Something I've always liked since I was a kid was secrets in games, and especially secrets that added extra fun to games, like stages or characters. Like most early-90s kids, I was obsessed with Sonic, and got really excited when I heard there was a secret stage hidden in the cartridge, the Hidden Palace Zone. Of course, all that excitement turned to disappointment when I used my cousin's Action REplay to access the HPZ and it was just unplayable garbage with a title card. Even more exciting than hidden bits of games, though, are entire hidden games, which is what this post is about.

Before I really start, I want to clarify the difference between "secret" and "unlockable": unlockable games will be easily accessible from an in-game menu, and the game might even acknowledge the games before they're available. Secret games require cheats or passwords to get to, and the game doesn't let you know they're there if you don't know about them already. There'll probably be posts about some unlockable games on this blog in the future, but today I'm talking about three secret games, that also happen to all be shooting games hidden away in the bowels of non-shooting games. 

First up is Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf for the Mega Drive. It's a golf game, that would be totally forgotten by history, were it not for its secret. And that secret is a simple little game based on SEGA's beloved Fantasy Zone games. It's a single-screen shooter in which you have one life and a constantly increasing score, and all you have to do is stay alive for as long as possible. It's very simple and you're unlikely to last very long, but it is fun. The only problem is that it's a pain to get to: you have to get a game over in the main game, then input the famous Konami code on the game over screen. Getting a game over requires using one hundred shots on a single hole, which will take you about ten minutes. Best to do this in an emulator, and make a save state on the game over screen.

Next is another, much better Mega Drive game: Mega-lo Mania (known as "Tyrants: Fight Through Time" in America), which is a surprisingly deep real-time strategy game about giant immortal floating heads using humans to wage war against each other. Inputting the password "JOOLS" into the game's save/load option also unlocks a weird, vaguely asteroidsy shooting game where you fly around space and impotently shoot at seemingly-intangible enemies, until one of the main game's floating heads says "do you want to be on my side", then flies in and smashes you to death. Yeah, it's not very good. But luckily, Mega-lo Mania is really good, so once you've got over the novelty of having a secret game in there, you can just play that instead.

I've saved the most impressive secret shooter till last, and it's hidden in the early Playstation 3D fighting game Zero Divide. Though it's a game that's been forgotten by history, Zero Divide's got a lot of charm, and that mainly comes from the fact that the developers were obviously very excited about the inherent possibilities of all the storage space on a CD (compared to cartridges and floppy disks) and even the memory card. There's tons of unlockable stuff, some of which comes only after the game's been played for 200 hours, and there's a lot of weird experimental stuff too, like an annoying DJ who comments on how well or badly you play.

But anyway, among its many other features, Zero Divide also includes Tiny Phalanx, a cut-down port of the X68000/SNES shooter Phalanx, a game that's infamous in the west for the bizarre boxart the SNES version got in North America. It's unlocked by holding start and select on the second controller as the game loads up, and it's really good. It looks and sounds great, it's got proper power-up and scoring systems and it's just really impressive for a secret freebie. Since Zero Divide came out in 1995, there were probably full games being released at the same time that were lower quality.

Chaos Heat (Arcade)

If you think way back, you might remember when I wrote about a terrible Playstation survival horror game named Chaos Break, and how I mentioned that it was a vastly inferior "adaptation" of an arcade game called Chaos Heat. This is that very game. Obviously. Before I start, I should also mention that the emulation of this game isn't totally perfect yet, but it's definitely good enough to play.

Anyway, it's a 3D action game, that's structured like a beat em up, but you mostly shoot stuff, rather than punch it. I guess kind of like the later Capcom game Cannon Spike? It's got the same plot as a million other 90s videogames: you're a member of an elite military team, and you've been sent to some remote lab full of genetically-engineered monsters. There's three characters to pick from, and they're different not just in movement speed and attack power, but in the weapons they carry.

To elaborate, the weapons can be shot normally, by tapping the fire button, or they can be charged by holding it down. So different are the characters' weapons, that even the way charging works is different for each of them. For example, one character's charge attack is a powerful laser that fires continuously for however long you held the button before releasing, while another character's charge attack only works if it's charged all the way, and it increases the power of their normal shots for a short time. The third character doesn't have a charge weapon, instead firing a powerful flamethrower that uses up ammo at a much higher rate than their normal gun when the button is held.

As you play the game more, you'll encounter various other interesting things about it, like how there are branching paths through levels, that diverge based on your ability to perform timed tasks, like protect an NPC teammate for 30 seconds while they hack an electronic lock, and so on. Different paths through stages can even lead to entirely different boss fights, too, which is more impressive than the "same boss fight, different background" offered by the likes of House of the Dead 2!

The most interesting thing from a historical standpoint, though, is a mechanic that's way ahead of its time for a game released in 1998: the player has an invincible dodge roll move. I know Chaos Heat probably isn't the first game to have such a thing, but it's still something I associate with more modern action games, like Dark Souls or Bayonetta (actually, is the DS roll even invincible? It's been years since I played it). Once you know that this move is there, it totally changes the flow of the game, as it does in most games where it exists. The only downside to it is that it's performed with a double direction tap, rather than a single button press, which does feel slightly unwieldy.

Chaos Heat isn't a great all-time classic, but it is a bit of a hidden gem, and it's a crying shame that Taito decided to make that horrible survival horror game rather than give this one the home port it deserved. As it is, though, if you can tolerate playing a game in less-than-perfect emulation (or if you somehow gain access to a real cabinet), Chaos Heat is definitely worth a look.

Volleyfire (Game Boy)

Long-time readers will remember a few times in earlier posts where I mention having a 32-in-1 pirate cart for my Game Boy as a kid, which, along with a few mainstays like Tetris, Tennis and Alleyway, also contained a whole load of lesser known Japan-only games that I otherwise would have never heard of, of which Volley Fire is one. I think the title is supposed to suggest a kind of volleyball, but played with fire, and I can kind of see where they're coming from with that, but it's more like a more advanced version of the 1975 arcade game Western Gun/Gun Fight. But with spaceships instead of cowboys.

The game's setup for the first stage is like this: you control as a spaceship on the bottom of the screen, and there's an AI-controlled spaceship at the top. You have to shoot each other and avoid each other's shots, while shot-blocking indestructible asteroids float by in the middle. Now, when I played this back in the ancient past, I saw this simple first stage, and got bored and moved on before bothering to get past it. Playing it again as an adult, I learned that I was wrong to give up on Volley Fire so quickly.

After the first stage, it quickly starts introducing new elements: destructible scenery, mirrors that reflect your shots back, an array of different power-ups, battles taking place in scrolling mazes, bosses fights, and so on. As the game goes on, it also starts to combine these things together. It also looks pretty nice for a 1990 Game Boy game, and it's got decent, catchy music, too.

Based on my old memories of it, I really thought I'd be telling you not to bother with Volley Fire, but it looks like I proved myself wrong, and it's definitely worth a look. It's not the best GB STG (that'd probably be Nemesis II), but it's still a lot of fun, and fairly unique, too.

Unknown Soldier - Mokuba no Houkou (DS)

There were probably three big audiences for the original DS: there were the little kids, who had piles and piles of licenced shovelware based on CGI movies thrust upon them, there were the anime nerds, who had piles and piles of other licenced games, along with a ton of RPGs and visual novels and so on, and the old people, who were enticed with puzzle compilations and IQ tests. Not much was done to entice the types of people who were, at the time, playing a lot of first- and third-person shooters based on real-life conflicts on the PS2 and XBox. Tamsoft saw that gap in the market, and made two attempts at appealling to it, first with The Simple DS Series Vol. 21: The Hohei ~Butai de Shutsugeki! Senjou no Inu~, and again with Unknown Soldier, which is a sequel to The Hohei in all but name. Oddly, neither game was released outside Japan, despite the obvious appeal they'd both have in the west.

Unknown Soldier, like its predecessor, is a full-3D third person shooter set during World War II, with a simple mission-based structure. The missions are about 10-20 minutes long each, and they all pretty much consist of the same thing: walk to the next checkpoint, killing nazis along the way. Simplicity in this case is a good thing, though, as it means there's no barrier at all to players who lack Japanese literacy.

The controls are somewhat similar to yet another Tamsoft DS game that I've covered here before, The Simple 2000 Series Vol. 39: The Shouboutai: you move around with the d-pad or face buttons (depending on your dominant hand, of course), and you turn and aim by dragging the stylus around a box on the touch screen. The touch screen also has buttons for looking down your crosshairs, changing or dropping weapons, reloading, and situational commands, like planting bombs or crouching behind sandbag walls. The shoulder buttons are both used to shoot.

Though the genre and setting wouldn't usually appeal to me, I have to say that Unknown Soldier is still pretty good. It's as technologically impressive as Tamsoft's other DS releases (I don't know how or why, but this small company mainly known for budget games consistently managed to get really good 3D graphics out of the original DS), it's pretty fun to play, and the sniper rifle is as satisfying as spiner rifles often tend to be. Though it is a little too satisfying, maybe: once you get access to sinper rifles a couple of stages in, you'll find that they're a lot more effective than your other weapons, at both long and short ranges, with or without using the scope.

Though the game has it's unrealistic touches, like your own character's regenerating health, or enemies suddenly appearing out of nowhere when you get to a checkpoint, it does also have one little bit of realism, that's usually ignored in 3D shooters: if you manually reload before finishing a clip, the bullets in the unfinished clip will be lost. Another nice little detail is one that reveals that there was at least one wrestling fan on the development team: you can pick from three playable soldiers, and they're named (despite the game's title suggesting otherwise) S. Austin, A. Anderson, and F. Goodish. The first two are obvious references, the third is a little less well known, referring to the real name of Bruiser Brody, Frank Goodish.

Unknown Soldier is a game I feel pretty safe in recommending. It's a competent entry into a genre that doesn't have much representation on the DS, and popping off nazis with the rifle is both fun and satisfying. As an extra note, there's a PS2 version of this game's Simple Series predecessor, Simple 2000 Series Vol. 102: The Hohei ~Senjou no Inutachi~ did actually get a PAL release under the title Covert Command. It's a bit simpler than Unknown Soldier, and it obviously doesn't have the novelty appeal of being on the DS, but you might be interested in having a look at it.

Mimi in The Sky (X Box 360)

 Along with zombie-themed Minecraft knock-offs and creepy photo-based dating sims, twinstick shooters are one of the most common genres on X Box Live Indie Games (how odd it is typing that in the knowledge that before long, we'll only be able to refer to it in the past tense. I really hope we don't lose the ability to play the games we've bought). Most of them don't really have any way of standing out from the crowd, though there are some exceptions. Early example I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 stood out despite the tired zombies premise through its unique " dancefloor at a dingy rock club" atmosphere. Mimi in the Sky is another one that stands out, though its unique nature lies more in its mechanics.

You see, the game's main hook is that it's a twinstick shooter with the design sensibilities of an arcade shooter, if not the prodction values (though that's obviously forgivable considering the circumstances of its existence). Like a lot of Japanese shooters in this post-Touhou world, you play as a flying little girl, beset from all sides by ghosts, witches, flying squirrels and other enemies. As you destroy them, two things happen. The most immediately obvious is that they release a load of grey numbers. These are points items, the bigger the number, the more the points. Also, the closer you are to the enemy when they're detroyed, the bigger the numbers will be. The other thing is that a meter at the bottom will gradually fill up.

When that meter's full, you can use the right trigger to perform a dash. The dash is a useful move, it provides a split-second of invulnerability and destroys any enemies through which it passes, no matter how big. Destroying enemies by dashing fills up yet another meter, which is activated as soon as it fills, starting fever mode. Fever mode offers no perks regarding your ability to destroy enemies or avoid their attacks, but instead vastly increases the scoring potential. While fever mode is in effect, the grey numbers will be multicoloured, and worth vastly more points.

As the game goes on, bigger and stronger enemies appear, and from the point at which the large witches floating in the foetal position appear, you can stay in fever mode almost continuosly (as dashing through one of them is enough to completely fill the meter). Shortly after this happens, though, the game gets a lot more dangerous, as thicker hordes of smaller enemies start appearing, along with enemies that fire aimed lasers that go right across the playing field, as well as enemies that fire rings of revenge bullets in every direction and so on.

Mimi in the sky is a pretty good game. It's no threat to Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi's crown at the top of XBLIG shooting games, but it's worth the 69p it costs to buy it. It's listed with its title in Japanese, so to save you the bother of trying to find it yourself, here's the link.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 35: The Shooting (Playstation)

I said it in my review of another Simple Series game with a very to-the-point title, Vol. 24: The Gun Shooting, but this game isn't as generic as you'd expect. Not only does it have a plot told in (thankfully skippable) FMV cutscenes between stages, but there's also little bits of voice-acted dialogue between your pilot and their comrades as you play through the stages themselves. As well as there being more plot and more effort put into the presentation than you'd expect, it's also a pretty full-featured (if not particularly original) horizontal shooter that gives the player lots of attack options.

But before I get onto how it plays, i'll talk a little bit more about how it looks. Now, the difficulty spikes massively in the third stage, and as a result, I haven't been able to get past that stage's boss. But, those three stages display either a love of the game's contemporaries, or a lack of shame in ripping them off, depending on how cynical you are. For example, the first stage takes place in a futuristic cityscape reminiscent of Einhander, the second over and under an idyllic ocean that calls to mind G-Darius, and the third a desert with a brief foray into an underground technological tunnel that vaguely reminded me of Thunderforce V, but only a little. All of this in that "low-poly models with low-resolution textures" aesthetic with which I'm sure all my discerning readers are enamoured.

Though the game doesn't have any power-ups, the player does start with an array of different weapons that really really remind me of Thunderforce V (as an aside, The Shooting was apparently developed by two companies called CyberDreams and C.I.I, and I haven't been able to find anything else they worked on. I guess there's a chance that those are psuedonyms for ex-Tecnosoft employees, but this is pure conjecture on my part). You have a machine gun, fired from the front of your ship, and from two options. By moving left or right while not shooting, the two options can be moved around the ship, allowing the player to shoot i wide angles, as well as above, below and behind. You've also got a lock-on weapon, which can shoot up to sixteen guided missiles in a nice Itano Circus-esque fashion. Unfortunately, it takes so long to fire that you'll usually have killed all the enemies with your machine gun by the time the missiles reach them (it's useful in boss fights, though). Finally, you have a forward-firing giant, powerful laser that's limited by a power meter at the top of the screen. The power meter recharges in a matter of seconds, but the catch is that it's shared with another, non-offensive feature of your ship: a quick dodging move that can pass harmlessly through enemy bullets.

What ties all these weapons and features together is a control system that's simple and elegant. Square fires your machine gun, holding X locks on your missiles and releasing fires them, and the dodge and laser are assigned to the two right shoulder buttons. It's obviously designed around the idea that the player will spend much of the game holding down the square button, but will also need regular, comfortable and instant access to the others (which wouldn't have been the case had all four functions been assigned to the Playstation controller's four face buttons). It's a little thing, but it's done so well that I feel it's worth mentioning.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 35: The Shooting is a pretty good game. It's nothing particularly spectacular or original, and the sudden upturn in difficulty presented by stage 3 is a pain, but it's much better than a budget title with a generic title really needs or deserves to be. Apparently, it also got a western release as "Shooter: Space Shot", which somehow feels like an even worse title. I don't know how intact the US version is, though, as we all know that western budget publishers loved to meddle in games, especially shooting games.