#10: HyperZone

Opposite of NORMAL? REVERSE.

HyperZone is the second HAL game in a row that I'd never played before. I've never even heard of this one! My initial thought was this was going to be a racing game of some kind, maybe an F-Zero knockoff or something.

Three dimensions!

Almost! I'm definitely flying around in a ship that looks a little like an F-Zero ship. It certainly sounds like an F-Zero ship. The SNES had 6 main buttons and this game decided to pretend to use all 6 of them. Three of them (A, Y, R) shoot your guns. Three of them (B, X, L) apply your breaks. That is all. You're flying around in a weird tunnel and can move up, down, left, and right while shooting anything that appears in front of you. It could be a triangle. Or a square. Or, even... A circle! You can't go forward or backward but I guess applying the breaks changes how fast you move forward so I guess you can move in 3 dimensions.

RIP Me.

Having missiles (well, glowing circles) come at you in three dimensions sounds cool but I found it pretty hard to figure out what I had to do to avoid most of them. I resorted to just flying erratically in the hopes that the enemies were good at aiming at where I used to be. This worked for 2 stages. On the third stage I changed ships to one with a new weapon. I could hold the attack button down to charge up a strong attack. Unfortunately this meant I wasn't shooting at all while charging which meant lots more stuff needed to get dodged. And then the passageway shrunk down and I could no longer erratically move without dying. So all the missiles hit me and I died anyway.

I restarted with the REVERSE option turned on. It seemed to just flip up and down on the controller. I didn't play very long on REVERSE because the game just wasn't very fun and I didn't want to play it. Would it have been fun as a kid? I'm not sure. The first level didn't have many things to dodge and was frankly pretty boring. And the next levels didn't seem very fair because I was bad at visualizing where to go to dodge the incoming missiles. The idea of a 3D shooter like this is intriguing but the execution here was not very fun for me. It reminded me a little of Rez if Rez had been brutally hard and not just boring.

It was visually interesting though. The game used the mode 7 graphics in a nice way. The music was nice as well. But I want to have fun while playing a game, and that just wasn't happening here.

Rating: D+