Fire Trap (Arcade)

The wikipedia page for 1982's crazy climber says that that game might be the only arcade game that's not a twin-stick shooter two use two joysticks and no buttons. That's definitely wrong, though, as Fire Trap is another game with that control system. Although, to be fair to whoever wrote the Crazy Climber wiki page, Fire Trap is essentially an update of that game with really nice graphics.

And those graphics are really nice. You scale lovingly-rendered isometric highrises, rescuing people and putting out fires, and when you have a second or two spare, you can take in some gorgeous views of the surrounding cityscape. And while it was typical for city-set arcade games of the 1980s to take their visual cues from the likes of The Warriors or Terrifying Girls High School, Fire Trap emulates a more optimistic, luxurious view of the decade of decadence: rather than climbing graffiti-covered tenement estates, you're climbing luxurious condos in the sun. The second stage is a particularly proud example of eighties excess, being set on a building constructed of pink concrete, with occasional swimming pools and sun decks. On a sidenote of probably-unintentional satire, you could say that the most eighties element of the game is that you get more points for finding a sack of money than you do for rescuing a trapped human.

Anyway, I have some bad news: although the game is really really nice to look at, it's not so nice to play. It's not only incredibly hard, but frequently feels unfair, and even mean-spirited. It has that same "evil fire" that almost every other fire-fighting game seems to have (in fact, it might even be the first appearance of the phenomenon), and the flames will shooting homing orbs of fire at you as you're climbing around. Not only that, but once you near the top of the building, a huge hovering, invincible fireball will start floating around, faster than you can possibly avoid it, meaning you just have to hope that it doesn't crash into you as you climb the last few windows to the top. In case you're wondering about the controls, up and down on each stick move the respective hands of your character in the pushed direction, pushing left or right on either stick moes you sideways, and pushing the sticks in towards each other shoots upwards. Obviously, I was emulating, and while you might think the most logical setup for these controls would be the two analogue sticks of an XBox 360 controller, but I actually found this to be slightly less responsive and immediate as I'd like, so I figured out a scheme utilising the d-pad and ABXY buttons of a USB Saturn pad, as well as mapping the shot command to the right shoulder button. This allowed for much quicker movement, and just felt a lot nicer, especially when building up the right rhythm for speedy ascension. (Were the last few sentences a bit pointless and self-indulgent? Maybe.)

Anyway, yeah; Fire Trap is a beautiful game, but you'll save yourself a lot of stress by just going and looking up a longplay video of it on youtube.

Simple Wii Series Vol. 4 - The Shooting Action

I know I'm over a decade late on this, but until a few weeks ago, I'd never played on a Nintendo Wii, nor had I played any other game that used motion controls (unless you count lightgun games). But now you can get a Wii for almost no money, so I decided to open up a new avenue of potentially interesting games for myself. So, a Wii game named "The Shooting Action" sounds like it would be a lightgun game, right? Or maybe a low-budget first person shooter? Well, it's neither of those! What it actually is is a kind of fighting game, specifically a very simple (a-ha!) Senko no Ronde-alike.

There's only four ships to choose from, each with a normal weapon and a limited-use bomb. There's a laser that ignores on-screen obstacles, a mid-range gun with exploding shots, homing missiles that do a ton of damage, and a fast spread weapon that's devastating a point blank range, and the corresponding bomb attacks are pretty much just bigger versions of the normal weapons. The controls are in something of a Robotron style, with your movement being controlled by the analogue stick, and your weapons aimed by using the remote to move an onscreen cursor round your ship. Hold A to fire, and press B to use your bombs.

Like I said, I'm new to motion controls, and this is the first motion-controlled game that I've played for an extended amount of time. It mostly works okay, with the only real problem being that it takes a minute or two to regain your bearings each time you load up the game, and having one arm outstretched the whole time you're playing is pretty uncomfortable. But I guess everyone else already knows all that, right?

Anyway, the game has all the typical fighting game single player modes: An arcade-style mode where you fight opponents of gradually increasing difficulty, a survival mode where you have a single health bar to fight off as many opponents as possible, and a time attack mode, which gives you infinite lives and finite time to defeat as many opponents as possible. I haven't been able to play the game multiplayer, but it appears to support up to four players (though the single player modes are never more than one-on-one).

There's also customisable avatars! Because, you see, each ship is ring-shaped, and your avatar sits in the middle, like they're in a swimming pool using an inflatable ring. Unfortunately, there's not many parts to use in dressing up your avatars, but on the plus side, they do look a lot better than Miis, so thanks to the devs for that, at least. A word of warning, too: I don't know if this is something that happens for everyone, or if I have a bad copy or something, but in the avatar menu, if you try to highlight an item you've not yet unlocked, the game will crash. So don't do that.

The Shooting Action is a fun little game. It's nothing special, and it's not a patch on Senko no Ronde, but it is a nice enough cheap-and-cheerful substitute (though it's not like SnR fetches a particularly high price either these days, assuming you still have an X Box 360 with a working DVD drive).