G-Type (PC)

G-Type was actually one of the first doujin shooters i ever played, back in the mid-00s. Unlike other games from that period, like Warning Forever or Dan! Da Dan!, it's not one I ever went back to in the years between then and now. That's not to say it's a worse game than those two (well, not significantly worse, anyway), it's just that comparatively, it's a lot more old-fashioned and slower paced than those games, and obviously I'm one of those impatient millenials that needs everything to be fast and flashy all the time. Well, my shooting games, anyway.

There's a good reason why this 2002 game is so slow and archaic, though: it's a loving homage and fusion of those two elder statesman of the shooting genre, R-type and Gradius. Later on, you even get to fight weird fusions of bosses from those two games and the Darius series, too! How it works is that the stages are mostly Gradius-like in design, and your ship is clearly a variant of the classic R-9 Arrowhead. The power-up system is the most coherent fusion of the two games, though. You collect generic power ups that each advance a counter at the bottom of the screen by one, and you press the second controller button to activate the currently highlighted power-up. So far, that's Gradius, right? The twist is that when you start the game, the fourth option is "Force", and the fifth and sixth are blank. When you choose force, the force floats onscreen and the last three power up options become "M-Way", "Laser" and "Burst". Laser refers to the blue power-up from R-Type, the three-way lasers, M-Way is a weak and boring multi-way shot, made pretty much redundant by the laser serving the same purpose, and Burst is the burst missiles seen in some of the Gradius games.

As well as the two big stars, there's also some homages to the Darius series in there! Firstly, the third stage, taking the form of the traditional R-Type battleship boss/stage takes place over a fire planet that periodically spits out firballs, like the first stage of Darius II. The fourth stage also takes the form of a boss rush, during which your opponents take the form of fusions of classic Darius, Gradius and R-type bosses.

You're probably wondering by now if there's actually a good game under all the homages and nostalgia, and there is. Like I said earlier, it's pretty slow-paced by modern standards, but it's still a lot of fun. It also looks great, with nice, chunky sprites, and a kind of high-contrast colour style reminiscent of R-Type Leo. The difficulty's also perfecty pitched: not too hard, and not too easy, and if you want to see a little further in the game (like if you want to take more screenshots to put in your review for example, ahem), you can start a new game from any stage you've previously reached. A good tip is to obtain and power up your force as early as possible, since when you lose a life, it stays behind with all its power-ups intact. This might be a little inauthentic, but it's also a pretty good way of alleviating the slippery slope that was prevalent in both R-Type and Gradius, whereby you lost all your power-ups on death, leading to rapid loss of the rest of your lives. If I remember right, didn't Gradius V do a similar thing with Options a couple of years later?

G-Type is a pretty good game, and a nice homage to its spiritual progenitors. If you're a fan of either of them, I'd recommend giving it a shot. Some advice though: you'll need to use JoyToKey or a similar program to use a controller, no matter what the options screen might suggest, and the only display options are a tiny 320x240 window and the same resolution stretched to fullscreen. That sort of thing doesn't bother me, but I know that some people are gigantic tedious snobs when it comes to that stuff.

Tokusou Kidoutai JSWAT (Saturn)

In the early days of the 32-bit era, there was a lot of experimentation going on, thanks to the fact that everyone now had access to things like texture mapped 3D and the ability to save games without increasing the price of the game itself (because of the cost of the battery needed to save in cartridge games) all in their very own home consoles. New genres were born, and other genres that had previously been confined to PCs in a time when very few people had them at home were made available to the masses. One of the latter genres being the first person shooter.

Now, for some reason, there aren't many Japanese-developed first person shooters, and the ones that do exist tend not to be very popular. Some of them, like JSWAT, don't really deserve to have been popular. I'll admit that there are some things I do like about the game, like the fact that it uses live action FMVs between stages to tell its story, and that those sequences do manage to be pretty seedy and grimy thanks to the harsh lighting and general dirtyness of how everything looks, in a case of a low budget working in a production's favour. There's also the fact that all the game's bullets are actual visible projectiles, rather than the invisible hitscan situation as seen with things like Doom's chainguns, for example. Of course, this also means that all the shots move pretty slowly, giving you and the criminals ample time to dodge bullets like some kind of superhuman. Another thing I like (or at least find mildly interesting) about the game is that the graphics mix full 3D (though very blocky and simple) environments with Mortal Kombat-style digitised sprites, which I guess helps maintain some small amount of aesthetic coherency between the people in the cutscenes and the people in-game. Though the in-game sprites are so low resolution, until you get up close they mainly resemble vaguely humanoid greyish blobs, which ruins the effect somewhat.

There's a few attempted concessions to realism, too. For example, you start each stage with a certain loudout of weapons with limited ammunition (you can choose these, but it's simpler to just pick the "auto" option), and you can only reload a weapon when its current magazine is empty. The game also tries to bring things into full 3D, making you actually aim your weapons vertically, as opposed to the "infinite height" enemies of games like Doom. Unfortunately, the way it does this is incredibly clunky and awkward: to aim, you hold the Z button, and move your crosshair around the screen with the D-pad. It'll stay in whatever position you put it in as you walk around until you tap Z again.

JSWAT also tries to complicate the first person shooter beyond just killing all the enemies and getting out of the stage. Since you're a member of the eponymous Japanese police squad, you're given missions, like rescuing hostages and finding illegally smuggled weapons and so on. This would be something I could count totally in JSWAT's favour, were it not for the fact that no matter what I do, I can't get the second mission (the aforementioned gun smuggling one) to end. I don't know if this is just a poorly designed stage with some obtusely hidden gimmick somewhere, or if, yet again, my Japanese illiteracy has caused me to miss some vital part of the mission's briefing.

All in all, Tokusou Kidoutai JSWAT is a game that's very ambitious, but not very fun to play. Even if i was able to get past the second mission, I think the clunky controls and general slow pace of the game would have stopped me from getting much further into it before boredom and frustration set in. I know the Saturn port of Doom is supposed to be pretty bad, but the console's also home to Quake, Exhumed and Duke Nukem 3D, all three of which it does an excellent job of hosting, and all three of which you should definitely play before you resort to this.