#116: Imperium

Giant robots, yo!

November 1992 appears to have been the month for shooters I'd never heard of. I'm going to pretty happy next week when this streak breaks... But for now, another shooter!

CYLON!

This game started off with some good music and an actual intro. I know the backstory for the game. There are evil robots, and enslaved robots, and the enslaved robots built a super machine to fight the evil robots. The twist? Only a human can pilot the super machine. I don't know where they found a human, but I am that human. And now I get to ride the super machine. Woo!

PEW PEW!

This game actually takes a couple twists on the genre that I really, really liked. To start, you don't die in one shot when you get hit. You have 5 health bars and are just game over when they run out. So it's still harsh, but it doesn't mandate perfect play. The second twist is how powerups are awarded. Normally in a shooter you have a bunch of enemies that are irrelevant and a couple that give powerups. In this game every enemy is worth experience and you level up after set values of experience. Leveling up heals you and unlocks a new attack. You also have a speed value so you control how fast you move.

I found the game pretty hard, actually. I didn't make it to a boss or the next level or anything. But I like hard when the hard is from legitimate challenge and not from bad interface or mechanics. Add on the good music and an actual intro and this is a game I regret not playing as a kid.

Rating: A

#115: GunForce

BATTLE FIRE ENGULFED TERROR ISLAND?

GunForce is another game that was entirely new to me. Guns make it sound like some sort of shooter. First person? Side scroller? Turns out it's more of a platformer. It's basically a Contra clone, actually. The opening sequence featured music that sounded like someone was trying too hard and a graphic sequence that was trying to use mode 7 graphics to be cool but failed miserably.

Get to the Choppa!

The game played a fair bit like Contra. Kill enemies, get some power ups, have better weapons. Jump into a vehicle or two. Get killed from one shot from anything. Lots of lives and continues and your power-up dropped on the ground when you died so it didn't feel too bad to die. It felt like it had the parts to be a fun game.

WHERE AM I GOING?!?

And then the game had to go and have a fundamental flaw. You walk faster than the screen scrolls. So if you walk forward you quickly find yourself at the very front of the screen. In a game where you die to one hit from anything. The way I saw it this left me with three options... Play the game enough to memorize where every enemy spawns so I can jump to avoid them and their bullets without seeing them. Juke back and forth to get the screen scrolling and then run back to safety, making very slow progress but at least having a chance to dodge bullets. Stop playing the game. I tried #2 for a bit but it wasn't fun at all so I moved on to #3.

The game also screwed up the controls. This is hard in a game with all of two buttons: jump and shoot. They decided to map 3 of the 6 buttons on the controller to jump and 3 to shoot but they went opposite of every other game that has ever been created. The button I think should be jump was shoot. The button I think should be shoot is jump. This is like when I tried to use OpenOffice but they'd flipped what tab and enter did compared to Excel. Maybe that was a fine way to control a spreadsheet. Maybe it's even the best way in a vacuum. But it's different from established conventions and that makes it annoying. I don't like to play games that are annoying.

The control issue I could have gotten over, but the scrolling issue is such a key component to a platformer that I can't even consider this as a real game anyone might want to play the way it is set up.

Rating: F-

#114: Firepower 2000

BANG BANG!

Firepower 2000 certainly sounds like a shooter of some kind. The title screen with a dune buggy and a helicopter make me think it's going to be a scrolling shooter. And likely one where you change vehicles based on the level you're in. Could be interesting... Or it could be two bad shooters in one package.

Beep Beep in a Jeep!

Judging from the scores at the top of the screen I'm now pretty sure this is designed as a two player game where one player controls the jeep and one controls the helicopter. I was the jeep and I had a jump button in order to shoot things that were obviously up in the air like planes. I could also drive backwards if I wanted to (though the screen kept scrolling) and could shoot sideways or on diagonals so that was a nice twist.

Boss fight? Nope...

It all felt a little bland though. It was hard to shoot a lot of things since I didn't have a spread attack weapon so I mostly just dodged around. I thought I reached a boss but he eventually flew off. I suspect this game is much better with 2 players than with 1, since there were things I couldn't reasonably hit with the jeep that the helicopter could probably take out. Especially if it has a spread attack?

It still felt pretty reasonable though. It didn't suffer from the major flaws that other scrolling shooters have suffered from, so it gets a decent rating.

Rating: B-

#103: Space Megaforce

By Toho!

I didn't know what this game was going to be, but I had a pretty good idea it was going to be a scrolling shooter of some kind from the name. Speaking of the name, when I saw what game was coming up I instinctively said 'SPACE MEGA-FORCE' out loud. And then the game itself did the same thing in a clear voice. It was a little trippy, and a little awesome. I already like this game!

So many powerups!

This game is, in fact, a scrolling shooter. One with at least 8 different power-ups you can collect. There's a 1 and a 4 on the screen in the screenshot above. It didn't seem like there was a way to switch between them other than collecting a different one again later, but each time you picked a given number up that attack got stronger. So it seemed like just picking everything up to see how they were leveling up was a perfectly valid thing to do. I ended up liking missiles best.

*sad trombone*

Unfortunately this game suffers from the same problem as pretty much every scrolling shooter. If you ever die you lose all your power-ups and respawn in a part of the game designed for having lots of power. I made it all the way to the first boss without dying, but then he killed me. And I couldn't get more than a couple screens forward from the checkpoint after that because I was shooting 2 bullets instead of 6 and 6 missiles.

That said this game didn't seem to suffer from sprite slowdown. It seemed to have a decent selection of power-ups. I think it could be really fun if a scrolling shooter is what you want to play. I didn't want to play a scrolling shooter so I didn't have a ton of fun, but I can't blame the game for that.

Rating: B

#99: Phalanx: The Enforce Fighter A-144

Phalanx: The Super Long Subtitle

I'd never heard of this game but the very descriptive title gave me a pretty good idea of what to expect. A SNES game with a fighter is going to be a side scrolling shooter, I bet!

PEW PEW! LASERS!

Yep.

Water sucks, yo.

There's actually not a whole lot to say about this game. On the plus side you have 3 health so you aren't instantly dead if you get hit. On the minus side when you do get hit 3 times you lose all your power-ups like in most other games of this genre. I've always found the level of perfection required with that stipulation to be a little much, though I did practice Gradius III enough to beat it so I guess I didn't mind it too much when I was younger.

At any rate, while this game didn't seem to be anything special it also worked just fine. It wasn't mind blowing and the rate of gaining power-ups after you died was on the slow side but all in all I think I could have really gotten into playing this game as a kid. It isn't bad.

Rating: B-

#96: James Bond Jr.

Nice colour scheme!

So... Is James Bond Jr actually a thing? I have to admit to never having seen a full James Bond movie and really the only way I've ever interacted with the franchise at all is Golden Eye 64 on the N64. There was no James Bond Jr in that game!

Got my shoe powerup, now I can jump high!

The game started off with some pretty cool music. Very different from anything else I've ever heard from the SNES. I liked it. There was a bunch of cutscenes explaining the story which is nice. Bad guy steal shiny thing. Bad guy use shiny thing to do evil. James Bond Jr get shiny thing back from bad guy. Then I got dumped into what seemed to be a mediocre platformer. My jump and attack buttons weren't beside each other on the controller (B and X) which was super awkward.

PEW PEW!

The platformer didn't last long. I think I fought two enemies before I got whisked into a helicopter where I got to play a mediocre scrolling shooter. A hard scrolling shooter. It kept making me fly through little tiny corridors (by blocking most of the screen with gigantic trees) and then it would shoot fireballs through the corridor such that I couldn't find a way to avoid taking damage. One hit kills you if you don't have the shield power up. I died five times before making it to the end of the stage so I don't know if there was going to be a boss, or if I was going to get to platform again, or what.

The platforming seemed bad but I wanted to give it a chance on a real level. The shooter was bad, and I got game overed so I never got to find out what the split between the two genres was going to be. And I still don't know if James Bond Jr is a real thing. (Wikipedia tells me yes, as a bad American spin-off. James Bond Jr is James Bond's nephew.)

Anyway, the music was awesome but everything else seemed pretty bad to mediocre.

Rating: D

#91: Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf

GET TO THE CHOPPA!

On the surface Desert Strike seems like a propaganda game designed to keep US morale high for the ongoing war in Iraq. No, not the recently ongoing war in Iraq, the old one. The game is very careful to not call out Saddam by name (his character is called 'The Madman') but it was very clear when it first came out that this was a game about Operation Desert Storm.

The game puts you in the role of a chopper pilot running various missions. Fly over here, kill a radar site. Fly over there, kill a power station. That sort of thing. It plays a lot like a sandbox game like Grand Theft Auto, though. In the first mission you have 4 different quests. Then there's a 5th hidden quest that unlocks from the 4th one. There are other things you can do on the side too, like rescue more dudes. One of the dudes is even a MIA copilot you can use in future missions to increase your gunning skill. Yes, a sidequest to increase your stats.

Watch out for the little mans!

The controls are actually pretty smooth, and the graphics are really good for an open world scroller on the SNES. Really, really good. I was surprised today at how good they are, and I remember thinking it was really good back when I was a kid too.

It's not just the graphics and the controls. The missions make sense for a war in the desert. You have lots of flexibility on what order you want to do things, and the tactical map is a thing of beauty. You can scroll through to get locations on all sorts of things. Ammo pick-ups. Fuel. Enemy locations. Targets. Combat lets you use 3 different types of ammo!

I'd forgotten this game existed, but as soon as I started playing it again it all came back to me. In a good way. I am surprised at how good this game is.

Rating: S-

#89: Blazeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge

BLAZE ON!

blaZeon is a game I'd never heard of, but from the name it sounded like it was probably a racing game of some kind. Turns out it's a side scrolling shooter ported to the SNES from the arcade. That hasn't gone very well thus far in this adventure...

PEW PEW!

This game has a twist on the standard kill things to get power ups to become viable and then die once and get screwed thing. There are no standard power ups at all. Instead every now and then a gigantic mech will come out and attack you. You have a stun pod you can launch at it which turns it blue. Then if you fly into it you become the giant mech! Interestingly if you do any damage to the mech before you stun it your captured mech keeps that damage so you need to just stun it, never hurt it.

What? I don't even...

I got to the boss of the first level, lost my mech, and then had to try to win the fight with my remaining 2 lives and basic ship. I failed. I tried again. I failed.

The problem is this game was originally an arcade game. It wasn't built to be fair, or beatable. It was built to convince you to pump quarters into it. I'm generally pretty good at 'bullet hell' but this boss was something else. I really think he was just designed to kill you over and over. Want to get back to being awesome in a mech? Pay more money.

Man... Were original arcade games pay to win?

Rating: D

#82: RoboCop 3

Orion Pictures?

I wasn't expecting too much from a RoboCop 3 game, but my initial thought was that if they made 3 of these things it was probably not terrible. Unfortunately this is a game based off the movie 'RoboCop 3' and not the 3rd game in a progressively better series of games. Now, there were games based on the movies RoboCop and RoboCop 2 but they seem to have been made by different companies/teams so this game doesn't actually have the benefit of being the 3rd game in a series despite the name.

HOW DO I SHOOT THE ROBOT?

Very shortly into the game I ran into this robot that fires heat seeking grenades. (Maybe they're magnetic?) My gun shot while ducking couldn't hit it. My punch while ducking couldn't hit it. I couldn't figure out a way to aim down while jumping so I couldn't even pull off a cool acrobatic move to kill it. I died to it twice and then just gave up and ran by it. The first time it killed me by continuing to launch grenades from far off screen but the next time it gave up for some reason.

5th best!

Eventually I found out that I'd picked up a second weapon type that shoots up and down and I probably could have killed that robot with it instead. Then I got game overed and decided that I didn't want to play again to give that a try...

Why didn't I want to play again? The controls are super chunky. Avoiding enemy fire seemed really hard. Like, so hard it probably wasn't possible and certainly wasn't worth trying. Robocop's best plan was to walk straight into the enemies and hope he could shoot them before they shot him. There was enough health packs to sustain this on the first level so maybe that was actually the plan. I've never watched the RoboCop movies so I don't know if that's actually how he rolls.

Then I made it to what I assume is the boss. He was on a motorcycle that I couldn't seem to avoid and killed me from full in 2 hits. Screw that!

Adding my annoyance was the high score table. It didn't loop around. So I had to start at A and then cycle through every single letter to get to the Z. Old school pinball games knew enough to connect Z to A the other way! Maybe you stick blanks and numbers in between but you always let the player cycle. Not this game. No, whoever was in charge of the high score table code had never played a game before. Nor had the people testing it. If they had people testing it. (Or maybe they just ignored the tester feedback.)

Rating: F-

#76: Axelay

Credits? *sigh*

I didn't know what to expect of this game from the name alone. It's a new game to me and I was thinking some sort of beat em up like Golden Axe. It turns out this game has a reasonably decent intro with animation and text and everything to tell me what's going on; Axelay is most definitely going to be a scrolling shooter.

GOGO Axelay!

There was an options menu to let me remap the buttons which I always like. Not because I want to remap the buttons because it lets me know which buttons are in use! For this game 2 on the face and the L and R buttons for weapon selection. It's not using them all, but at least it's doing better than just being an NES game. The game also had a voice over when I started the game and chose my weapons. Nice!

Fancy!

The graphics actually made pretty sweet use of the Mode 7 feature of the SNES.The screen could scroll a bit side to side and the background looked really cool while that was happening.

This game seems to have everything going for it. An actual plot, good graphics, the best voice overs I've heard yet, and an explanation of the buttons. Unfortunately the game itself is terrible. It's like they put all their development effort into buffing all the things that normally irritate me and forgot to make a game. The speed and responsiveness of your ship is the most important thing in a game like this and it just doesn't work here. It's too slow to dodge anything and the enemy lasers come from seemingly random locations. It was a very frustrating game to play, and that's not a good thing.

Rating: F+

#73: Strike Gunner: S.T.G.

S.T.G. stands for STrike Gunner? Do you need the periods?

Strike Gunner is a pretty straightforward scrolling shooter. Get in a plane, shoot the things flying towards you, dodge the bullets that they're shooting at you. Reach a boss. Shoot parts of the boss so his weapons fall off. Win.

PEW PEW!

Strike Gunner does have some things going for it. It doesn't suffer from much hardware slowdown at all. It has a relatively straightforward weapon scaling system. It has 15 different super weapons to use with your super power meter. The controls are smooth.

Sonic boom!

Things aren't all perfect with this game. The music is mediocre, the plot is practically nonexistent (other than that it takes place is some sort of post apocalyptic future set in 2008), and it only uses two buttons. TWO BUTTONS! The SNES has 6 main buttons to use... I want more games to use them!

One interesting twist is with the super weapons. There are 15 to choose from but as soon as you beat a level with one of them you lose the ability to choose it. So for the 3rd stage I couldn't use the homing missiles or the plasma shield. This is the sort of thing I like and would have made this a good rental as a kid. You need to play a bunch to figure out the weapons and then you get to plot out the right order to use them based on the levels. I used homing missile on the first level and it was very straightforward so it was a waste. It would have been much more useful on the second or third level! I also suspect that if you play 2 player you can't share weapons which just adds more interesting decisions!

Rating: B

#71: Rampart

JOIN UP!

There are some sounds that stick with me for no discernible reason. I wouldn't have been able to describe the opening sound for Rampart before I played it today. Even now, 40 minutes later, I can't describe it at all. But as soon as it started playing I knew right away that it was time to build cannons and destroy my brother's walls.

PEW PEW!

Unfortunately I don't have a brother here so I can't destroy his walls. Instead I was stuck destroying these little boats that kept swarming my island. Stupid little boats. Stop attacking me! Shooting the little boats wasn't actually very fun. Targeting is quantized and not along the right grid to make it clear where to shoot to sink a boat. If they started moving it was right out. Even now I don't know if I needed to hit them multiple times, or if there was a chance to miss, or if I was just aiming badly. I ended up just unloading tons of bullets at each boat and taking many waves to kill them all. This is made easier by building more cannons every wave, I guess...

Tetris!

The other aspect of the game is the rebuild your walls stage. You get given a random piece of size 1 to 5 which you can rotate. You can't build over existing stuff like cannons, castles, or fires. Surround extra castles for bonus points and extra cannons! This aspect was actually really stressful. Am I going to get the piece I need? Can I mash buttons fast enough putting pieces into any legal spot to try to search for the right piece? Is it even possible to succeed? (Fires along the coast could make it impossible to fix a give castle.) Fail to surround any castle and lose.

I remember liking Rampart as a kid, and it was still ok even now. I suspect it would have been better with a second player? Even alone, this would have been a definite rental.

It even had actual voices! CEASE! FIRE!

Rating: B+

#64: Thunder Spirits

Thunder... Thunder... THUNDER SPIRITS!

I had never heard of this game so I didn't know what genre to expect, until I saw the title screen. This is going to be a side scrolling shooter. Or maybe a top scrolling shooter. Seika is the company that has brought us Drakkhen and Lagoon which were definitely on the sketchy side of the RPG genre... How would Thunder Spirits compare to other shooters?

PEW PEW!

The first thing I try in a new game is to hit all the buttons on the face of the controller. Three of them did nothing (no bombs?) and one of them shot my guns. Very slowly if I held it down, or I could really mash the button to get a semi reasonable stream of bullets. Maybe it's just me getting old, but I don't like having to constantly jam the button that much to accomplish something. Give me autofire! Or a limited number of bullets so mashing is detrimental. Don't make the only way to reasonably play your game be to mash one and only one button!

TROGDOR!

I got some powerups along the way. Some of them seemed to do something, others did not. Then I noticed there were more icons at the bottom of the screen. Could I hit select to change them? Nope. But it turned out L and R both cycled through the options at the bottom. R would change my currently equipped weapon. L would change my current ship speed. Changing speed sounds good, because it means I could go slow through an intricate maze of bullets and fast to avoid sharply turning enemies but because you could only toggle in one direction and there were 4 speeds it didn't seem plausible to change on the fly. So I just set it to as fast as possible and hoped I wouldn't careen into things. I did. Changing weapons was interesting in that the powerups would only buff some weapons and death would only level down the currently equipped powerup.

The game had limited lives, and limited continues, but if you continued you got to keep going right from where you died. So it was more like slightly less limited lives. I still managed to lose them all without beating the first level. I may have made it to the dragon boss but he had a fire breath attack that seemed to be unavoidable. Once I ran out of continues I had no desire to restart from the beginning. Especially with my right arm going numb from all the button mashing.

Rating: D-

#47: Raiden Trad

PEW PEW LASERS!

I had never heard of Raiden Trad. Or of Toei. Or of Micronics. Or of Electro Brain. This doesn't bode well.

MOAR LAZERS!

The game turns out to be a scrolling shooter with pretty much all the flaws of the other scrolling shooters. It has power-ups, but they all go away when you die. And there are multiple different options that aren't compatible. I was doing fantastic, but then I accidentally replaced my heat seeking missiles with something that just went in a straight line. And then I couldn't damage anything on the sides. And then they shot too many bullets and I died.

Woo!

And then once I was dead I was down to normal bullets and no missiles of any kind and couldn't possibly survive. Too many bullets, guaranteed dead. I did not miss anything by not playing this game as a kid.

Rating: F

#46: Contra III: The Alien Wars

UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN...

I don't really have a lot to say about Contra III. I really liked this game as a kid. I really liked playing this game in University. And I really liked playing it again on an emulator. There was a controller quirk which frustrated me, but that's a problem with the emulator or my controller and not the game itself. (The system interprets the right trigger and left trigger on my xBox controller as being the same button. So while I can hit both of them just fine and it can tell the difference I can't hold them both down at once. Which meant I couldn't do the awesome spinny attack. I tried remapping the buttons but I'm too used to using the right bumper as a screenshot key.)

OPEN YOUR VULNERABLE SPOT!
I WANT TO KILL YOU!

After playing so many games in this little adventure I've started to gain a real appreciation for well built, smooth games. Contra III definitely falls into this category. It's hard, but it's definitely fair. Everything works the way it feels like it should work. And it's fun!

One twist the game has is it puts you into a top-down mode for a couple of the levels. It's like you're playing Super Smash TV, except it's well done. You can rotate the screen, there are little indicators showing where you need to go, and you can still use all the weapons from the normal mode.

Contra III also has excellent multi-player. If you want to do well you need to share the limited power ups. If you're like my brother and I instead you learn where the good power-ups will appear and make sure you get there first. I'll take the spread weapon... You can have crush!

Rating: S-

#38: Super Smash TV

Smash and Cash!

I remember renting Super Smash TV as a kid and being frustrated by it. Other people loved it, I know, but I never could get into it. I'm not sure why. Is it the theme? I'm not a big fan of gunning down huge swaths of people, but I don't think it would be much better if they were robots or zombies. I love killing huge hordes of zombies (Dead Rising is such an awesome game) but I like there to be a little more strategy and variety to it beyond aim your auto-fire gun in a direction and mow them down.

For the record, the game shows that debuted on television in 1999 include Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Greed. Both of which heavily featured cash grabs, but neither of which included sending a swarm of humans with clubs after a guy with an infinite ammo machine gun. The intro sounds more like The Running Man than actual 1999 reality. Hmm... I think I'll go watch The Running Man again.

The game actually featured voice acting, which was pretty surprising. It was just this puffed up host yelling at me, but it was way more than I expected from the SNES. The game played pretty smoothly. It's pretty much a remake of Robotron 2084 except with a worse theme. It made use of all 4 buttons on the face of the controller which is a pleasant surprise. The 4 buttons were used to simulate a second joystick so you could walk your guy in one direction and shoot your machine gun in the other.

Maybe I'm just not very good at this genre of game. I donno. It just seems overly hard and not terribly interesting. That said, it does actually seem like a real game. If you like this sort of game then I can imagine you'd like Super Smash TV, even today.

Rating: B+

#33: Super E.D.F.: Earth Defense Force

If you're going to stick the whole thing in the title, why have an acronym too?

We've hit another game I'd never played before, or even heard of! I recognize the company name solely from Super Bases Loaded which was fine but unspectacular. What is this game, and would it do any better?

It's only logical.

Well, the first thing I got to do is choose a weapon and there's a terrible graphic of a ship being held in place by a couple of robot arms, so this is probably a side scrolling shooter. That's quite a variety of weapons and it's a little sad that I'll probably only get to have one of them at a time. Maybe power-ups will give the rest?

Yep, definitely a side scrolling shooter, but one with no power-ups to collect. The weapon you choose is what you've got until you die. On the plus side you only have 3 health points and no extra lives so you're going to die in a real hurry. Especially if you make the mistake of choosing a weapon that only shoots forward, like the vulcan. The second wave of enemies comes from above! And covers the entire screen! And repeats seconds later! I honestly can't see how someone who chose the vulcan weapon doesn't lose 2 of their 3 health almost instantly. My second choice was the homing missiles which worked exactly as advertised. I no longer had to worry about trying to hit enemies and just had to worry about dodging bullets. Which worked fine until I made it to the boss who covered the screen in lines of bullets. I bet if you knew the pattern you could pre-plan your dodges, but I didn't so I couldn't. And when I died I was forced to restart from the beginning.

Oh, and the game has lag issues when there's lots of bullets on the screen like pretty much every shooter on the SNES thus far.

The game had three buttons, but I honestly couldn't tell you what one of them did. The other one toggled your ship between being terrible and being awesome so you only hit it once. At least it had auto-fire so I just had to hold the shoot button down.

There've been a lot of medicore to bad shooters thus far, and this one definitely falls on the bad side of things. I didn't miss anything as a kid by not playing this game.

Rating: F+