Pop Breaker (Game Gear)

Pop Breaker is an odd game. It feels a lot like an old computer game in a number of ways. The first and most obvious way is that the game's protagonist is the female driver of a futuristic tank, and that the game contains various (clean) pictures of her looking cute. (The pictures themselves are also fairly cute, being limited to the colour palette and very low resolution of the host hardware. The second computer-like trait might not sink in immediately while playing, but it is the most important and is the trait around which the entire game is built: the stages were clearly constructed using some kind of simple level editor program (which, unfortunately, has no in-game version).

 The game sees the player controlling their futuristic tank around various stages, with the aim of each stage being to destroy a stationary device, kind of like the Cores that appear in the Bangai-O games. The stages also contain various obstacles: breakable and unbreakable blocks, arrows that push the tank in the direction they point, triangular blocks that change the trajectory of enemy and player shots (interestingly, the player and enemies fire the same kinds of shots and all shots are treated equally when it comes to destroying blocks, enemies, and the player's tank), and several kinds of enemies who all have their own distinct patterns of behaviour.

Pop Breaker plays something like a hybrid of a shooting game and old-school tile-based action-puzzle games, Because of this play style, on first glance, movement and scrolling will seem jerky and awkward, but this is a necessary part of the design: everything in-game is measured in tiles, and a lot of the game is about being in the exact right position to shoot something or avoid shots or trick enemies into shooting each other. Most enemies are two by two tiles, the player's tank is three by three, while walls, shots and most other objects take up the space of a single tile.

The fact that the player's tank is three tiles wide ties into another odd quirk: before starting a new game, the player chooses whether shots will be fired from the middle, left or right tile. I strongly recommend against choosing the middle tile, though I don't see any specific advantage that left or right might have over each other.

Yeah, Pop Breaker is an interesting game. It's far from being essential, but it's one of a few slightly quirky Game Gear games from smaller developers, and it's definitely not a bad game.

As a little extra note, I've recently started a Patreon! If you pledge two American dollars a month, you get to see all new posts two days before they appear here, and I'd really appreciate the support!

Taekwon-Do (SNES)

Like the previously-covered Champion Kendou, Taekwon-Do is part of the mostly dead (apart from MMA and Boxing games, usually featuring real-world athletes) genre of combat sports videogames. Obviously, it focuses on the Korean martial art Taekwon-Do, and, unusally, even offers an option to play the game in Korean rather than Japanese (though, wasn't the import of Japanese videogames to Korea illegal when this game came out? I don't know).

Though there are other modes, such as a King of Fighters-esque team battle mode, and some kind of character edit/training mode that I couldn't really work out, as its pretty text-heavy, and I can't read Japanese or Korean, the main single player mode sees the player selecting a character and taking part in tournaments around the world. There are three possible ways to win a match: either knock your opponent out, knock them to the ground five times, or have scored the most points when the time runs out.

Successful attacks score one to three points each, while knockdowns and ringouts are worth five each. The score totals aren't visible until the end of each match, presumably to stop players building up a safe score and then blocking or avoiding attacks until the counter runs down. There's no visible health bar, but knockouts usually seem to be achieved by completely overwhelming your opponent with constant attacks. The game controls pretty simply: the face buttons combined with directions on the d-pad execute various attacks (mostly kicks, of course), and the shoulder buttons are held to take on different stances, and also to move up and down the mat. The sounds for attacks connecting and being blocked sound like wood blocks being knocked together, which is more effective than my description implies, and gives a very different feel to the more visceral sounds heard in regular fighting games.

Since this is an attempt at a fairly realistic martial arts sports game, the characters are all just guys in Taekwon-Do outfits, and, in fact are all head and palette swaps of the same sprite. Don't take this as a negative, though: the developers have used this fact to their advantage, as that one sprite has a ton of expressive animation. Not only are there special reaction animations to getting hit by ceratin attacks, or in certain situations (for example, a character taking a strong hit to the gut will hunch over and hold themselves for a few frames, while a character being hit mid-jump will stumble on their feet when they land), but the fighters also show various levels of fatigue, which seem to be effected by various factors, such as the character's own stamina stat, the severity of the beating they've taken and the amount of jumping and other energetic moves they've performed. By the end of a particularly fierce bout, both characters will be breathing heavily, shoulders slumped and knees starting to buckle. This depth of animation really adds a lot to the game, and I'm slightly worried I'm not doing a good enough job of getting that across.

Soyeah, Taekwon-Do is definitely a game worth looking into for those wanting something slightly different from a typical fighting game, as well as those interested in how a videogame can take its weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

Ninpu Sentai Hurricanger (Playstation)

So, it's a licenced game based, obviously, on the 26th Super Sentai series of the same game (the suit action scenes from which were also used in the US/New Zealand series Power Rangers Ninja Storm). And it came to be released pretty late in the Playstation's life, the reasoning behind which I assume must be down to the fact that it was also very early in the Playstation 2's life and I guess the idea was that the young Super Sentai fanbase wouldn't yet have been able to upgrade.

Predictably, it's an action game, with the player taking control of the Hurricangers and their various mecha, fighting goons and monsters and at some points, other giant robots. Each stage represents an episode of the TV show, and is structured in a manner that will strike a familiar chord with Super Sentai fans. Typically, a stage will open with a section where the player defeats gangs of weak enemies, either in short beat em up segments, or occasionally in crosshair-pointing shooting gallery sections. Next up will usually be an on-foot fight against the monster of the week, which will play like a boss fight to the earlier beat em up segment. Finally is the main draw of these shows: the giant robot fighting against the giant version of the monster from the last part.

The giant robot fights don't play out like the other parts of the game, however: they start with a section with the camera behind the player's mech, in which the ploayer must move from side to side to avoid and deflect projectiles shot by the enemy until an opening to move in closer and attack comes up. When this happens, there's a short sequence in which the player hammers the attack buttons as fast as possible to knock the enemy back, followed by a first-person section that sees the player punching and slashing and using special attacks to deplete the enemy's health.

The game's presentation is perfect, with the in-game graphics being pretty much as good as they could be on the Playstation, and even the use of FMV works in the game's favour. The FMV clips used are short bits of stock footage that are used in the same place as they are in the show itself: transformation sequences, final attacks, and so on. The story mode is only a few stages long, but there are a bunch of extras, like a VS fighting mode, with all the rangers, enemies and monsters as playable characters, and an extra stage featuring a team-up with the red ranger of the Super Sentai show precedin Hurricanger, Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger.

You can probably work out what I think of this game by now, but yeah, I definitely recommend Hurricanger. If you're a fan of the show itself or the genre in general, it's a perfect adaptation, and even if you're not, it's just a really fun action game that's also very well presented.

Bogey Manor (Arcade)

The creators of Bogey Manor seems to have a fair few non-videogame influences in their repetoire, both in the general aesthetic, and even in the mechanics. Firstly, it was released in 1984, a year after Ghostbusters so it doesn't seem too out there to suggest that a comedic game about a guy who uses technology to fight ghosts might have been trying to ride that movie's wave of popularity (though, as barely anyone has heard of it, the tactic doesn't seem to have worked, unfortunately). The other influences all tie into the game's mechanics in some way (and some more than others).

But before I get onto them, I should really explain the game itself, shouldn't I? In it, some guy named Fritz goes to a series of ramshackle old mansions to, I guess exorcise them by destroying all the crystal balls therein. Each house is also infested with various kinds of monsters: ghosts, frankenstein's monsters, witches, and so on. Each house is divided into four screens, and each screen has four floors on it, with stairs and doorways being the way to get between floors. Most of the time, the player can only see the floor they are on, though there is an item that appears in each stage that illuminates every floor. After each orb in a house is smashed, the house starts to collapse from the top down, and the player has to rush to the exit. Failing to get to the exit before the house completely collapses results in death, obviously, but it also gives the player a different death screen than the usual, which is a nice touch.

Outside of the likely Ghostbusters cash-in attempt, the biggest influence on the game is probably Scooby Doo: the game takes place in a series of run-down old haunted houses, and the player's main method of attack is a nice little foray into silly slapstick comedy: to defeat most enemies, the player has to press one button to distract the monster by pointing at the floor or ceiling, and then press the attack button to clobber them over the head with their stick/lightsabre/thing. Most of the monsters don't stay down for long, and the fact that even ghosts can be beaten in this manner suggests that maybe, like most Scooby Doo monsters, they're just crooks in disguise?

The last, and least expected influence is Kamen Rider, or maybe just tokusatsu shows in general. I mentioned before the doors that can be entered to quickly travel from floor to floor, and on each stage, one of those doors (which i think is randomly selected each time, though I'm not certain) will be flashing, and upon entering the flashing door, the player is treated to a short transformation sequence, and for a short time become Super Fritz, who can beat up enemies without distracting them, and who moves slightly faster than regular Fritz, too. In an unusual move, however, the game actually penalises players who use Super Fritz's power, as there's a ten thousand point bonus at the end of each stage for not doing so.

Bogey Manor is a game I definitely recommend. It's fairly unique, and once you get used to it's little ideosnycrasies, it's a lot of fun to play.

Leucistic Wyvern (X Box 360)

Looking at this game's logo, and the dragon the player controls in the game, you'll probably think the same that I did: that it's some kind of flagrant no-budget Panzer Dragoon "homage". That's an innaccurate thought, though: while the creator was obviously a SEGA fan (the fonts used in-game are also really similar to the fonts seen in AM2 arcade games in the mid-90s, particularly bring the Virtua Cop games to mind), it actually plays more like Space Harrier.

There's none of the locking-on seen in Panzer Dragoon, it's all about flying around (while travelling in a straight line, obviously.) while shooting enemies and trying your hardest not to collide with them, their bullets or any of the bits of scenery jutting out of the ground. The scenery is the only real bad point of the game. It's hard to describe, but for some reason, it's really difficult to judge the positions of the obstacles and the player in relation to each other. It's worst of all in the bonus stages, which have points bonuses floating in the middle of large rings, and despite them being bonuses stages, the player can still lose health during them.

I'd also like to talk about the presentation: the graphics are a strange mix of low poly models, with the sharpness that comes with modern HD console games. There's a minor problem that's actually similar to the SNES game I recently covered, Bishin Densetsu Zoku, in that there's a kind of sparseness in the environments, compared to its SEGA-produced inspiration, and being in 3D makes the stages look like completely empty, incredibly vast wasteland stretching out for hundreds of miles. The music and sound effects are a bit of a weak point, though. The music, though inoffensive, just seems to be there, while the sounds effects seem to have been recorded at different levels of volume.

Though Leucistic Wyvern has a few problems (and it's definitely no contender for Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi's XBLIG crown), it's a fun game to play, and it's definitely worth the 60-something pence it costs.

Bishin Densetsu Zoku (SNES)

Bishin Densetsu Zoku is a game set in Japan,'s distant future of 2010. As far as I can tell (without being able to actually read any of the plot), it's about a boyfriend and girlfriend (either of whom can be selected for play, though the boy is a better fighter) on a fun futuristic roadtrip, who have their date ruined by a bunch of mean goons. Unlike most games with futuristic roadtrips as the main centrepiece of their plots, Bishin doesn't focus on vehicular combat: though the bulk of the game is driving, and there are enemy drivers who can be defeated through aggressive, repeated ramming, the main business of fighting foes takes place in short beat em up sections.

Along with the game's hybrid structure, the other cool idea it has is the passage of time. Every stage has a time limit, but rather than just be a generic number of seconds counting down to zero, each stage starts at a time of day, and the destination must be reached before a certain time. These times also provide contiunity: stage one starts at 9am, and the end must be reached before midday. Stage two goes from midday to 4pm, and the third stage from 4 till 8, with the sun gradually setting as time passes. Time passes at a rate of roughly one game minute for every two real-world seconds. When the player crashes their car, a short beat em up section starts, in which the player must defeat a small group of enemies (who, oddly seem to be almost exclusively female) as the clock still runs.

Unfortunately, despite having all these cool and interesting ideas crammed into it, their execution lets Bshin Densetsu Zoku down. The driving sections are not linear, having the player find their own way from point A to point B on the map. The problem lies in the fact that not only do all the roads look exactly the same, without even Outrun-esque roadside objects to break the monotony, but the on-screen minimap doesn't display the layout of the roads. The result of this is long, frustrating minutes driving round in circles, often finding yourself back at the start of the stage with scarce time remaining.

The beat em up sections aren't much better, either. Though they don't have any massive flaws like the driving sections, they're just kind of bland: the player doesn't have many attacks, there's only one small background per stage (though the boss fights get their own backgrounds, too), and the enemies all look the same, even between different stages.

It's really a shame that this game's not very fun to play, as the concept is cool, and it does have a lot of good ideas, they're just executed poorly. As it stands, I have to say that playing Bishin Densetsu Zoku quickly starts to feel like a frustrating chore, and it's not really worth bothering with.

Curiosities Vol. 2 - Mini Vaders and Dottori Kun

These two games are by different companies (Mini Vaders by Taito, and Dottori Kun by Sega), and are in different genres. They do have things in common, though: they share an incredibly minimalist aesthetic, with no colours, no sounds and very simple sprites, and though they look like they're early experiments into videogames from the 1970s, they were both actually made and released in the early 1990s.

The story behind this is that they're both games made as cheaply and simply as possible, with the purpose of being packaged with JAMMA arcade cabinets. There are two stories floating around the internet as to why these games exist: the first is they exist to ensure that the cabinets are functional, and the other is that there was a Japanese law at the time that required that all arcade cabinets be sold with games installed. I don't know which is true, but the legislation story seems the most plausible, since neither game appears to have any kind of test functions.

Mini Vaders is the best (or at least, the most interesting) of the two games, being a very simplified Space Invaders variant, with no score and no lives, but a somewhat unique design. Each stage consists of a formation of invaders that don't shoot at the player, but they do advance down the screen very quickly, and it's up to the player to shoot them before they do. It goes by the classic Space Invaders rule of allowing only one of the player's shots on-screen at a time, and due to the fast pace of the invaders, missing a single shot can mean death.

Dottori Kun is not so interesting. The game is a simple dot-collecting maze game, with the player controlling a V and avoiding a CPU-controlled X. When the screen is cleared of dots, it refills and the players score increases by one. The player can increase their speed by holding the fire button. That's it for Dottori Kun. I guess it doesn't really matter though, since neither game was made to actually be played by anyone.

Zangeki Warp Trial (PC)

So, I thought I'd try out something different with this post: rather than talking about a game that's already been overlooked, I'm going to talk about the demo for a game that isn't out yet, and of which my readers might not be aware.

So, some of you might be aware of the Japanese PC developers Astro Port, with their catalogue of shooting games, as well as the awesome Assault Suits-alike Gigantic Army. And I'm sure that most of you will know of the recent Comiket 87. Astro Port didn't release a new game at C87, but they did release this demo of their upcoming game.

It's a shooting game, and in keeping with Astro Port's other shooters, it's of an old-fashioned, pre-bullet hell design, ala Gradius, R-Type, Darius, and so on. It also has a really cool, fairly unique gimmick, though: as well as the fire button, there's also a warp button. When held, the warp button freezes time and gives the player a cursor to move around the screen. When the button's released, the player's ship warps to wherever the cursor was, hitting any enemies between the two locations with a slashing attack, and ignoring any walls or other obstacles in the way. There's also no power-ups in-game, but instead a more RPG-esque system of putting points into different stats, with more points being rewarded between stages.

I've played to a little over halfway through stage two, and not only do I love the gimmick itself, but the stage design perfectly compliments it. The first stage is an introduction to the use of the warp, while still managing to be a pretty robust challenge, while the second stage is totally merciless, expecting the player to have mastered warping around and all the little nuances of the game's controls.

I definitely recommend getting this demo (from here), and I look forward to the full game being released. The only issue I have is a very minor issue: It would be cool if there were some kind of points incentive for destroying or damaging enemies with the slash attack, rather than shooting them.

Kotobuki Grand Prix (Playstation)

Augh, this game is terrible. I'd seen it around before I'd actually played it, and wondered if it might be one of those budget-priced hidden gems, of which there are so many on the Playstation and PS2. Then one day, I needed to find an extra game to meet a shop's minimum purchase for paying by debit card, so I took the plunge and bought Kotobuki GP.

Obviously, it's a light hearted racing game, in the time-tested Mario Kart knock-off mould, even down to copying the little mini-jump thing that Mario Kart has. The graphics are okay, considering it's a PS1 budget title, and not even a part of the Simple 1500 Series at that. Although even this concession of going easy on the game because it's a budget title can be eschewed once you realise that it was actually a full price release in 1999, rereleased by its publisher as a budget game two years later. The European release didn't come until 2003, when budget publishers selling Japanese games they licenced on the cheap were pretty much all that was left in the world of Playstation releases.

Why is it so bad? Well, there are a number of problems, with three in particular taking centre stage. Firstly, each track has a set number of items available, and they don't respawn. So by the final lap, there'll be none left, which is very odd for game of this type. Secondly, all the racers feel both slow and unweildy. There's just no joy, no speed, and no satisfaction to be found in racing around the tracks. Thirdly, every track, from the easiest to the hardest, has at least one completely unforgiving 90 degree corner that's almost impossible to take without crashing.

There lots of other flaws, too, like the almost complete lack of structure in the game's Grand Prix mode, or the awful sound effects and music, but generally, I'd strongly advise against playing this game. It's so bad that it's actually depressing. The one positive thing I can say about it is that the same day I bought it, I also bought Ridge Racer V.

Hi no Tori Hououhen (MSX)

I'll admit something here before I start: despite all the critical acclaim it gets, I've never read or watched any version of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series, upon which this game is based. In fact, before playing this game, the most contact I'd had with it was the cameos in the excellent GBA game Astro Boy Omega Factor. But from what I gather, the series is some kind of great philosophical work. Though none of that gets through into the game, which is a vertically scrolling shooter, it's still pretty unique in its own right.

The unique factor is that Hi no Tori adds an element of exploration to the mix. Exploration in a scrolling shooter might be hard to fathom, but it does work fairly well. The stages only scroll upwards, but they do loop vertically, and there are exits to the left and right at certain points, essentially making each stage a collection of interlinked sub-stages.

The player spends each stage seeking out stone tablets, each marked with kanji, which open gates marked with the same kanji, until one of those gates leads to the stage's boss fight. Boss fights take place in their own seperate, non-scrolling stage, a cool-looking cave made of skulls. The game looks pretty great in general, easily one of the best-looking MSX games I've seen, up there with Aleste 2.

It's technically sound, too, with your shots coming out pretty much as fast as you can press the fire button and Takahashi Meijin-esque displays of button-hammering prowess are a skill worth developing for this game, as a fair few of the enemies are mild bullet sponges, while others might be weak, but attack in thick, aggressive formations. Most of the power-ups are typical of shooting games of the era: improving the range of the player's shots, increasing the player's movement speed, etc., but one odd point is that there's two different kinds of invincibility item: one that causes enemies to die on contact while in effect, and one that doesn't.

Hi no Tori is a pretty good game, that's unique and it looks great, though it is very difficult. Not to the sadistic level of Evil Stone, but its difficulty definitely lives up to the stereotype carried by late 80s shooting games. I'd say it's definitely worth a look if you're curious.

Evil Stone (Arcade)

Evil Stone is an odd game. It's a beat em up, but rather than taking place on a traditional scrolling path, it takes place on grids of floating rocks. Furthermore, it's a beat em up in which the player has no kind of health counter, and can theoretically take an endless number of hits without dying. Obviously, the catch is that the player instead dies by being knocked back into an empty space and falling to their death. The player can move in four directions, and there are only two action buttons: jump and attack, though jump can be pressed twice to jump two spaces instead of one, and attack can be held for a second or two for a more powerful and longer-ranged charge attack. Aesthetically it's quite interesting, too, as the plot deals with the gates of hell opening, and demons flooding heaven and earth, and the designers seem to have been influenced by both western and Asian visions of hell and its inhabitants, with a slightly stronger emphasis on the Asian.

The game starts with a moderately easy stage to introduce its concepts, though in this case "moderately easy" is relative and should be interpreted as "somewhat less sadistic than what is to come", as you probably won't even reach the boss on your first attempt. A useful thing to know, though, is that you should grind the goblin/demon enemies at the start of the stage until you collect enough power-ups to turn your charge attack into a projectile, otherwise the boss will be almost impossible to beat, if you manage to get that far without projectiles.

After the first stage, any kindness the game may once have shown the player will be thrown out of the window. There will be jumping puzzles, tests of agility, and periods of aggressive bombardment by respawning enemies. Sometimes there will even be jumping puzzles that test the player's ability while they are also being aggressively bombarded by respawning enemies. I had to do some credit feeding to get a couple of stages in, so that I could take some more varied screenshots, but some way into stage 3, I just had to give up altogether.

Despite the fact that Evil Stone is undeniably a cynically designed money-grabbing credit muncher, and despite the insane, sadistic difficulty, it is still technically a fair game. Or at least, I'm fairly certain that theoretically, someone with inhuman skill at playing videogames could possibly have a chance at finishing the game on a single credit after decades of practice. Which, although the difficulty of Evil Stone means that you could never accurately describe it as a fun game, it is at least in a higher league than "pay-to-win" mobile phone/facebook game scams. I still don't recommend playing it though, except as a curiosity.

Net Yaroze Round-Up Volume 5!

Katapila (Ben James, 2003)
This is a really simple game, you play as a bouncing ball and you jump onto ever-higher plaftorms, while trying not to fall off the bottom of the screen. It's the opposite of the games that were pretty commonly found on pre-smartphones in which the player's character had to fall onto platforms as the screen descends. There's also difficulty levels, which affect the speed of the screen scrolling, the speed of the ball's movement, and whether or not platforms disappear fter having been jumped on. It's an okay game, but nothing really special in any department.

Manic X (Tuna Technologies, 1997)
Another simple one, and an idea that's seemingly as old as homebrew games and romhacking itself: it's Pac-Man with some variations. Those variations in this case being different mazes for each stage, and the fact that the food items have been replaced with randomly appearing power-ups such as invisibility potions, dynamite that instantly kills all the ghosts, and so on. It's also pretty nice looking, it looks just like an Amiga game! The only real problem with it is that it seems to be a little unfinished: there's no music or sound, and once the player runs out of lives, the game just quits back to the Yaroze main menu.

Terra Incognita (Mitsuru Kamiyama, Shintaro Tajima, Kunikatsu Tachi, 1998)
Terra Incognita is a game that doesn't really fit on an obscure games blog, as it's by far the most well-known Net Yaroze game, but it is so well-known that it's monolithic and almost synonymous with the system. For those who don't know it, there's two main reasons it's so well-remembered: the first is the legendary English translation of the script, and the second is the fact that the production values are so far beyond anything else done on the Yaroze system. It's an action RPG about a guy going to a monster-infested island to seek out treasure. It's just typical action RPG stuff: hitting monsters and finding keys and so on, but obviously, the way it looks and sounds makes it something of a spectacle.  Also of interest to long-time readers of this blog is that the makers of Terra Incognita (collectively known as Team Fatal) also made the weird Fatal Fantasy VII demo.

Super Mansion/Yakata Plus (Tomukazu Sato, 1997)
So, this is apparently a port of a game from the FM Towns Marty, and it's kind of like Resident Evil, but without any monsters or combat, just puzzles and keys and the like. Unfortunately, it's all in Japanese, and I don't have the patience to stumble through an action-free adventure game like this. It all seems competently made, though, so the Japanese-literate and the patient might want to give it a look. Otherwise, there are also a few playthroughs on Youtube. While I was playing it to put it in this post, I noticed a poster on a wall in one of the rooms, which caught my interest.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any information on it, though luckily, selectbutton forum members Dark Age Iron Savior and Takashi (who have both also helped researching stuff for posts on this blog in the past) were able to dig up more: The artist of the Brainax poster was a friend of the game's programmer, who, in times long since past, had a website, which is archived here, which contains more Brainax art, as well as other art for projects that unfortunately don't seem to have gone anywhere.

Winged Gear (PC)

So, Winged Gear is a freeware shooting game, made by a guy named ZAP back in 2006. Unlike most doujin shooting games, it isn't a bullet hell-style game, nor does it feature any little girls. It's actually a very old-fashions single-screen shooter with elements of various games such as Smash TV and Raimais (though, the similarities with Raimais are pretty much entirely aesthetic), as well as a few modern twists, mainly in the fact that it has a scoring system, life system and weapon system tied to the same high concept.

That high concept is that bullets, whether they came from the player or an enemy, shrink as they get further from the source, becoming less powerful. The bullets have three sizes, and the player has three hitpoints for each life. Bullets at their largest are instant death, medium bullets take two HP away, and small bullets one. This ties into the scoring system, through use of a multiplier applied to destoryed enemies based on what kind of bullet was the last to hit them: x4 for a large bullet, x2 for medium and x1 for enemies killed by small bullets or bombs. It's nice how all these things tie together into a single system, isn't it? There's also yellow triangles dropped by destroyed enemies which are worth points, but aren't specifically tied into the bullet-shrinking system. They do, however, lose value the longer they're on-screen, though, so you're more likely to get more points from them if you were near the enemy when it died.

Aesthetically, the game is okay. It's very functional in its looks, with very little flair, though everything about those looks, from the sprites to the backgrounds to the colour palettes used would allow it to fit in perfectly among similar games from the late 1980s, with a lot more authenticity than most modern games claiming to have a "retro" aesthetic. There's also something about it, possibly the designs of the enemies, that makes it really feel like an Amiga game, in fact, when I said earlier that it had a similar look to Raimais, it looks like an Amiga port of Raimais might have looked (though obiously, this is also if Raimais was a shooting game rather than a maze game).

Winged Gear isn't anything amazing or special, but it is a fun game that's fairly addictive, and the aesthetic authenticity it displays is pretty admirable, too. Also, it's free so it's not like you have anything to lose by trying it.