Shooter
November 1986 (Micronics/Capcom)
I’d disappointed. I know that people are going to not like this, but I am. I switched this back and forth between a thumbs up and a thumbs down more times than I’d like to admit1.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled lately. I like Commando, and Ghosts ‘n Goblins was amazing. Capcom might have raised my standards a bit too much. Maybe I should have played 1942 before the other games. In the end, I decided that was the biggest problem and that’s why it’s ultimately getting the thumbs up.
Where Commando felt right, 1942 felt slow. I know it’s a bomber, and a WWII bomber at that. But shouldn’t it go faster than some guy walking around on the ground? At least the planes all move at a good speed relative to each other.
One major thing that this has going for it is the lack of sprite flicker. Not saying it doesn’t exist, but it is a lot better.
Like all of the arcade ports that I’ve noticed so far you can continue if you get a game over. I think that’s great that the developers understood that people could in theory play forever in the arcade and didn’t take that away from people who bought the game for a home console.
If you really like shooters this isn’t all that bad. But I wouldn’t use it to convince someone that shooters are great either. Not that we’ve had any of those yet anyway. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun time waster. But I’m not going to lose sleep over the fact that I’m not very good at it.
- That number is somewhere between 3 and 50 for those who care. And that’s not counting the times I wanted to switch it but didn’t because I was in the middle of a sentence. [↩]
This port is pretty cruddy. As would be expected since it has programmed by Micronics, the masters of producing buggy NES ports. Mabye worse than the flicker is the music – that horrible, ear piercing, music. Micronics also did some ports for SNK, so prepare yourself for more suffering.
I think the Micronics SNK ports are even worse, if only because the games for SNK really weren’t all that NES friendly. The control scheme of Ikari Warriors had to be pretty heavily adapted for the NES controllers, and it says more about the lack of available titles than anything else that Athena’s port made it to the NES, as the game, even in the arcades, is just too punishing for its own good.