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Post by dsparil on May 2, 2022 10:26:15 GMT -5
OverrideDeveloper Sting Publisher Data East Format HuCard Release (JP) January 8, 1991 Release (US) Unreleased Difficulty Low Looping Yes Continue System Resurrect in place with upgrades lost, 5 continues from start of level Although it lacks the RPG elements of Psycho Chaser, Sting’s second shooter on the platform more than makes up for it in pure excitement which goes beyond any previous game on the system. The health system is generous with hit points in addition to easily gained lives. Power ups are also very frequent making deaths a minor speed bump rather than a serious set back. The game is very focused on offensive play from this and also includes a powerful autocharging attack and rapid fire by default. It’s only real failing is the fairly generic graphics, but so much is usually happening that there wouldn’t be time to appreciate better designs. Override also received a reworked release on the X68000 as Last Battalion which added in a few additional features. Approximate Hitbox
Gunhed gets all the attention and honestly hyperbolic proclamations that it's the best PCE shooter or even game in general, but this is so much better. I think it suffers for being a Sting game since I think people generally don't remember or know that they weren't an RPG focused company in their earlier days. This is also their last original game for the platform as they subsequently only developed a port for the system which will also show up here before switching exclusively to SNES work for the rest of the generation.
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Post by dsparil on May 4, 2022 14:15:00 GMT -5
Aldynes: The Mission Code for Rage CrisisDeveloper Produce! Publisher Hudson Soft Format SuperGrafx Release (JP) February 22, 1991 Release (US) Unreleased Difficulty Moderate to High Looping Yes Continue System Checkpoints with upgrades lost, unlimited continues Aldynes was the first game by Produce!, and it is unsurprisingly uneven. As a SuperGrafx game, there are some graphical effects not possible on the original system, but the overall art direction is bland outside of a few bosses. The weapon system is also poorly designed with weapons varying in greatly in utility and one specific power upgrade is a functionality downgrade. The main gimmick is the up to four options that follow the main ship. They have three modes; stationary, homing and rotating; but homing mode works erratically and the stationary mode’s additive firing is mostly unaffected beyond a single option. There are a few decent levels, but the game is largely uninteresting and still features some flicker and slowdown despite the hardware. Approximate Hitbox
Produce! was founded by Shinji Imada, and Moby Games and GDRI both say that he was the designer of R-Type and Image Fight. I wasn't able to dig up a source for this. Everyone on R-Type has a non-obvious pseudonym and Image Fight doesn't have credits. If it is true, that makes Aldynes extra disappointing. It's telling that their old website doesn't highlight it as a game they developed.
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Post by dsparil on May 6, 2022 9:11:02 GMT -5
Dead Moon: Nightmare of the Moon World Dead Moon「月世界の悪夢」 Dead MoonDeveloper Studio Ducks Publisher Natsume Format HuCard Release (JP) February 22, 1991 Release (US) October 1992 Difficulty Low Looping Yes with full reset Continue System Resurrect in place with upgrades lost, unlimited continues from start of level Dead Moon was largely developed by former Zap staffers on Barunba and Burning Angels. Although it lacks any of the notable features from either, it also has a stronger design sense. Telling the story of an alien invasion of the moon, the levels progress in a natural way which puts it above most games in this aspect. Each level features a mid-boss in a typical mechanical style but end of level bosses are skeletal animals for no stated or implied reason. The game also reorients the ship based on boss position making battles less tedious. The main problem is that the gameplay is genre standard aside from the few quirks and lacks a defining element. While it is an advancement over their earlier games, Dead Moon doesn’t quite manage to rise above the mid-range. Approximate Hitbox
This one does have a really screwy hit box. It doesn't include the bottom of the ship but does include the blank space above the nose. The developer is sometimes listed as Zap since Barunba and Burning Angels was developed by them, but the credits clearly list it as Studio Ducks. They didn't seem to last a group beyond this game and seem to have reformed as Wonder Amusement Studio for Twinkle Tale on Genesis the following year before disbanding entirely.
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Post by Snake on May 6, 2022 11:25:19 GMT -5
OverrideDeveloper Sting Publisher Data East Format HuCard Release (JP) January 8, 1991 Release (US) Unreleased Difficulty Low Looping Yes Continue System Resurrect in place with upgrades lost, 5 continues from start of level Although it lacks the RPG elements of Psycho Chaser, Sting’s second shooter on the platform more than makes up for it in pure excitement which goes beyond any previous game on the system. Guilty as charged! The first time I heard of Sting as a developer, it was at the tail end of Super Famicom's life with Treasure Hunter G. Looks like a cool, low-stress shooter.
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Post by dsparil on May 6, 2022 11:41:39 GMT -5
It was the same for me and Treasure Hunter G. That was so late on the system that it was also one of the earliest games people tried to translate although no one got very far at all. It is interesting that Knights in the Nightmare does have some small shooter elements. That felt very strange to me when the game originally came out, but its executive producer actually worked on Psycho Chaser and Override!
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Post by excelsior on May 6, 2022 17:30:11 GMT -5
I think graphical simplicity goes against Sting's games. Regardless Override has always been really pricey so there must be a base driving that unless it was just produced in particularly low quantities. I haven't played it but I think both Override and Psycho Chaser have some of the more atmospheric and enjoyable soundtracks on HuCard. Psycho Chaser does a good job with it's very simple design so I'd really like to get hold of Override also. Neither game seems to have been discovered particularly but I think Shmup Junkie did a good job of praising them in his previously discussed video.
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Post by excelsior on May 10, 2022 0:55:39 GMT -5
Detana!! Twinbee - Developer - Konami
- Publisher - Konami
- JP Release - 28 February 1992
- US Release - N/A
- Format - HuCard
Konami didn't show a great deal of support for the PC Engine disappointingly but when they did they made it count mostly taking advantage of the platforms proven market for shoot-em-up's. There are a few arcade ports with Detana!! Twinbee arriving in early 1992, just a year after the arcade version. Twinbee's gameplay is a fairly simple vertical affair that takes after Xevious in having to fend off flying enemies through standard fire and bomb attacks being used to fight those found on the ground. Personally I've never been a fan of the bombing mechanism as often it requires too much precision for my liking, but in Detana!! Twinbee the automatic targeting system allows for a less involved and for me more enjoyable approach. Defeating enemies leave collectables such as fruit and one ups to be found, but of course these aren't the main source of collectable... Know Your Bells!!Twinbee's primary powerup system involves finding bells through firing at clouds which start out golden as per the ordinary and reward points. Fire at these in succession which propels them upwards creating a juggling effect and hitting them enough times cycles through to a coloured powerup. There's a deal of care to be taken as hitting them again will make them revert to their golden state losing your chance at a powerup which can mean holding fire against enemies creating a risk/reward system. How fond a player is of this powerup mechanism may well tell how much they're going to like the game as it can become frustrating, especially as once hit too many times the bell cracks revealing an enemy. In finding enjoyment in the idea of course it's imperative to know what bell does what so I've given details below: Gold - Bonus Points Silver - Gun Upgrade Blue - Speed Upgrade Green - Creates a mirror image which adds firepower Red - Barrier Purple - Tail Shields Black - Speed Down There is another important power up - Gwinbee, who is found as a collectable by destroying ground based enemies. Gwinbee will fly across the screen and must again be collected at which point the ship will combine with your own to widen your beam. Levels and Bosses!!
The levels themselves look great, doing a nice job of recreating the colourful pastel styled aesthetic of Detana!! Twinbee with more limited hardware capabilities. For a HuCard game it's really quite impressive with each stage bringing it's own flavour. The settings are interesting and vibrant. I'm particularly fond of stage 3's visual where we fly over settlements built upon floating islands, using parallax scrolling to add depth. Stage 4 follows with ocean-like coral but in the air which gives off an alien feeling. The only disappointments come from the fact that there's only seven stages, mostly being fairly short and that visually the arcade is substantially better looking. Each of the seven stages comes with a boss battle which I thought were a highpoint. The initial boss is pretty standard, but following there's a good amount of creativity on display. Stage 2 features a battle against an airship, which looks great but adds interest by taking the fight all the way around the vehicle, adding obstacles to avoid and cannons to take out whilst enemies head your way. Another interesting design had a boss with a turn-style surrounding him, which would respond to your fire and rotate his hit point, creating a puzzle to the battle. Difficulty!!The arcade version of the game is tough as nails but the PC Engine version does a good job of catering to an array of capabilities with it's difficulty options. There's four difficulty levels; easy, normal, hard and pro. Beating the game at each increased level adds more to the ending graphic, and of course the game loops pushing the difficulty upwards. With easy being simple enough for most players to see through and each level raising the game noticeably there should be a way for everyone to play. If you're not satisfied with that there is also the ability to increase lives and continues from the start. Verdict!!Of course Detana!! Twinbee doesn't match the visual flair of the arcade original but the PC Engine version does a nice job when taken on it's own. The gameplay is kept enjoyable through a powerup system that allows the player to become powerful and versatile firing in multiple directions whilst giving plenty of protection from shielding abilities. The stages are diverse and creating with simple enemies for the most part but doing a good job of keeping things interesting with ever changing locales and a perky soundtrack that emphasises the light cartoon design. The game runs nice and smoothly and even allows for a second player simultaneously for even greater enjoyment. The biggest issue I have is that it's all over pretty quickly, and though the game loops it doesn't recolour the backgrounds as the original version does. Though I do think it's the weakest of Konami's shooters on the PCE I recommend this as a nice game that's welcoming to all comers.
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Post by dsparil on May 10, 2022 8:00:53 GMT -5
1943 Kai 1943改Developer Naxat Soft Publisher Naxat Soft Format HuCard Release (JP) March 22, 1991 Release (US) Unreleased Difficulty Moderate Looping No Continue System Resurrect in place with weapon kept, 5 continues by default Naxat’s rendition of 1943 Kai goes beyond a simple port of the arcade Kai and is a proper third edition of 1943. The original makes numerous tweaks to the base game in order to make it a tougher “expert” version. Naxat made additional tweaks which largely moderate the difficulty such as increasing the plane’s speed and drastically reducing the hitbox while keeping the added intensity. More substantially, they also substituted three of ten levels with four new ones featuring more varied gameplay along with an upgraded plane and increase in difficulty to match. This increase is out of step with the added power and feels more balanced towards the two player mode. Despite this, the unique content raises this version above its repetitive source material. Approximate Hitbox
The title could be translated as something like 1943 Revised, but Capcom officially used 1943 Kai in Capcom Classics Collection. I should also note that the hitbox in the original Kai is basically the entire plane so shrinking it to just the core make a big difference. In the original 1943, the hitbox doesn't include the wings but does include the tail although considering their stubbiness, it might as well be the whole thing. I did soften a bit on this after replaying it along with substantial chunks of the earlier variants. I didn't use them, but it might also be more fun using codes. There's a bunch, and one of them dumps the weapon timer which is a bit of an annoying feature.
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Post by dsparil on May 10, 2022 8:20:21 GMT -5
Detana!! Twinbee Twinbee's gameplay is a fairly simple vertical affair that takes after Xevious in having to fend off flying enemies through standard fire and bomb attacks being used to fight those found on the ground. It is interesting to me how vertical shooters start dropping the ground as a separate plane the further you get from Xevious. There's a lot of things that are "tend to"s between horizontal and vertical games, but treating the ground differently is the only hard difference I've ever been able to think of. I suppose there could be a horizontal game that lets you shoot off into the horizon or limits the play area in way that lower enemies have to be dealt with bombs, but I'm not aware of any that do either.
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Post by excelsior on May 11, 2022 2:13:11 GMT -5
It is interesting to me how vertical shooters start dropping the ground as a separate plane the further you get from Xevious. There's a lot of things that are "tend to"s between horizontal and vertical games, but treating the ground differently is the only hard difference I've ever been able to think of. I suppose there could be a horizontal game that lets you shoot off into the horizon or limits the play area in way that lower enemies have to be dealt with bombs, but I'm not aware of any that do either. I always thought of Xevious style bombing as a solution to a 'problem' that doesn't exist in horizontal scrolling games. Of course games like Gradius have ground based attacks but you can also move towards the bottom of the screen and it's more dynamic. It doesn't really act as a replacement because from a gameplay perspective the two require a different approach by the player - the horizontal case being much more passive. I think that does explain why horizontal shooters don't have a direct equivalent though. For why the lower plane mechanism disappeared I'm going to guess due to the move toward bullet hell style games. Classic style vertical shooters seem to be few and far between so we only have games focused on bullets filling the screen. I think perhaps there's just too much visual 'noise' that dealing with a second layer on top of that might be tougher to communicate to the player. I can't be the only one though who thinks some games just did a poor job of implementing it. It works in Xevious because the small ship can be maneuvered between bullets whilst being positioned and it does much to test player skill. I kind of hate it though in games like Dragon Spirit etc where it feels clumsy due to the larger hit box and so fewer attacks have to be placed on screen for it to even work. I kind of wonder if the idea fell out of favour because of some poor implementations somehow. -- I've been trying to find my latest purchases so I've been playing a few games on emulator, these being the ones you've already covered so I'll give a few impressions. Down Load - I like the Akira style hoverbike and the aesthetic in the first level. That was about it. I don't agree on the difficulty because as soon as I hit stage 2 I was finding it tough (so many sprite flicker deaths), but I wasn't having a great deal of fun with it from the offset so I agree the standard of the game isn't that great. Xevious Fardraut Saga - I've only played on handheld before and wasn't too keen - not the optimal way to play really. Trying it on my PC I had a much better time. This game doesn't review well, clearly due to the limited visuals. I've seen a bunch of reviews go without mention that there's two games on the cart even which makes me wonder how much they played. Anyway I really like it from a gameplay perspective. Violent Soldier - I'd never played this before even a little bit. I thought it felt a bit naff at first with the localised charge and a simple shot not exciting me as an arsenal to start with. Then I powered up and I was having a blast. The open/closed shield mechanism is quite clever, and I like how well your ship is defended with additional shields to the top and bottom. It felt quite easy to me though, or at least until I died. After that finding my way into the game seemed tough, but I only tried a couple of times. I also think the game is really nicely drawn. It looks different from anything else on the platform.
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Post by dsparil on May 11, 2022 4:59:04 GMT -5
For Down Load, I still need to replay it to compare to the sequel, but I remember it being hardest at the beginning. I also thought it was easier with the laser than the default spread shot. You don't get enough opportunities to change weapons though. Part of why I consider it low difficulty is from the unlimited continues that put you at the start of the level section. They're short enough that I feel like it can be pushed through without having to constantly replay long sections while also dealing with limited continues.
With the ground plane, I think using fixed range bombs in a direct cloning of Xevious is not great especially since they generally don't get stronger. Like I noted for Cyber Core, it uses ground attacks a lot, but they only get more numerous in order to widen the attack which doesn't help that much. Raptor for DOS maybe hits the right approach with weapons usable on both at the cost of power or strong but limited to one. There are problems with the implementation, but the idea of swapping weapons and eliminating the fixed distance is a good one.
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Post by excelsior on May 13, 2022 2:38:46 GMT -5
For Down Load, I still need to replay it to compare to the sequel, but I remember it being hardest at the beginning. I also thought it was easier with the laser than the default spread shot. You don't get enough opportunities to change weapons though. Part of why I consider it low difficulty is from the unlimited continues that put you at the start of the level section. They're short enough that I feel like it can be pushed through without having to constantly replay long sections while also dealing with limited continues. Not to mention the password system too. So, yeah, it should be beatable from that perspective. I kind of wish other shooters had those kind of 'QoL' options since generally the lack of is why I don't get too far. I think I am getting just a little better at them recently mind you.
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Post by dsparil on May 13, 2022 8:31:00 GMT -5
Down Load 2Developer Alfa System Publisher NEC Avenue Format CD-ROM² Release (JP) March 29, 1991 Release (US) Unreleased Difficulty Low Looping No Continue System Resurrect in place with upgrades lost, unlimited continues from start of level The nascent Down Load series moves to what what feels like it’s natural home for its final and somewhat better game. The gameplay has several changes primarily to the weapon and life systems. There is now a fixed selection of four weapons with situational uses, but this comes with the loss of the secondary weapons. The game uses lives instead of health, but the addition of a fairly frequent and long lasting shield power up starting with the second level lowers the difficulty compared to the prequel. The graphics are largely better with more inventive backgrounds for the cyber space levels. However, the cut scenes have a poorer aesthetic than the original and the lack of subtitles makes the plot impenetrable for those without Japanese language proficiency. Approximate Hitbox
The site's article mentions that there's a mode accessible after finishing the game that changes the graphics to a bunch of weird stuff. I couldn't get it to work so I can't comment on it, and there aren't any videos of it on YouTube. There's also a hidden sound test / options menu accessible from the title screen (Select, I then II five times, Select) that has an entry for what should set this mode but it seems like the developers forgot to program it in.
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Post by dsparil on May 18, 2022 7:52:57 GMT -5
L・DisDeveloper NCS, Dual Publisher NCS Format CD-ROM² Release (JP) April 5, 1991 Release (US) Unreleased Difficulty Low to High Looping No Continue System Resurrect in place with upgrades lost, unlimited continues from start of level Released under NCS’s Masaya branding, L・Dis is a typical cute’em’up. The cuteness and inexplicably fish shaped ship are explained as being the drawings of main character Ta-kun and damsel in distress Yu-chan come to life. Like other games in the sub-genre, the graphics also counterbalance a difficulty that can be oppressive at times especially during the marathon final level. The game does offer a shield upgrade of up to three levels and features one of the smallest hitboxes on the platform. The most notable element of the game is the voice cast which is made up of veteran voice actors. Most notably, Ta-Kun is voiced by Mayumi Tanaka, the voice of Krillin in the Dragon Ball series. The lack of subtitles makes Japanese knowledge a requirement to appreciate the dialogue. Approximate Hitbox
It's a little hard to pin down exactly who developed the game, but supposedly Dual handled the technical side and NCS did the rest. I also didn't know before this game that Masaya was just a sub-brand of Nippon Computer Systems in the same way that Sunsoft was the video game brand of Suncorporation although I'm not sure why NCS decided to stop publishing games around 2000. Presumably they got out simply due to rising development costs and partnered with and eventually sold their back catalog to a different mostly enterprise oriented company, Extreme.
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Post by dsparil on May 20, 2022 8:47:36 GMT -5
Hellfire S — The Another StoryDeveloper Toaplan Publisher NEC Avenue Format CD-ROM² Release (JP) April 12, 1991 Release (US) Unreleased Difficulty Low to Moderate Looping No Continue System Resurrect in place with upgrades lost, unlimited continues from start of level Hellfire was the first of Toaplan’s limited forays into the horizontal shooter genre. By their own admission, Toaplan’s experience with the vertical format did not translate leading to a game considered somewhat of a disappoint by them and lacking “exhilaration”. The main gimmick lies in the ability to switch between four weapons varying in their direction of fire. As you can only cycle in one direction, it can be clunky to switch between weapon especially firing forward and backward. What makes the S version special is in its addition of voiced cutscenes although they are not subtitled. Featuring designs by Hiroyuki Kitazume, most noted for his work with Sunrise on the Gundam series, these scenes give this port a reason for play and a leg up over the Genesis version and original. Approximate Hitbox Shmuplations has an interview that touches upon Hellfire and Toaplan's issues with the result. They're trying to be polite and obscuring their disappoint, but it seems clear to me that they weren't happy with the result especially if you compare it to how they talk about Ultimate Tiger in the same interview.
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