Shooter
September 1987 (Hudson/Broderbund)
I was all set to give this game a thumbs down. Like Winter Games it’s a port of an already existing game. It doesn’t seem to get any real upgrades for the NES version. It has a wonky control scheme.
Worst of all, it just drops you down in the middle of the world without any sort of explanation about what’s going on. There have been and will be more games that do this. The Legend of Zelda for one, and people still love that game so the whole suddenly materializing in a world thing obviously isn’t the kiss of death.
That doesn’t make it any less annoying though. Especially in a world where publishers are moving away from even having instruction manuals packaged with the game. In a way, I think that’s better than the 4 page manuals I get with Madden. But that’s a discussion for another time1.
The story for the game is pretty standard. The bad guys are trying to take over the world and you are the lone person who can stop them. I still think that’s crazy, but whatever. I don’t think we’re going to get away from the lone gunman thing for a while. With shooters it just feels weird.
All of the islands look the same. A bit of a different layout but essentially the same thing.
The first thing you need to know is that you really are dropped down in the middle of the world. Take off from the carrier and go try to bomb some factories.
Just like every other game known to man you have a certain number of bombs you can carry and unlimited machine gun ammo. The difference here is that you can go back and land on your carrier and refill your ammo. To make it even better you can get the damage at least partly repaired. None of the other shooters that I can think of right now have a place where you can always refill your health instead of having to hope an enemy drops some energy.
The best part though is that on the islands you can find a spot to steal bombs from the Bunglings. How many other games let you steal ammo from the enemy? And no, enemies dropping items doesn’t count. Shame on you for thinking that.
Essentially all of the islands are the same. But for some reason that just doesn’t seem to matter. I still think it’s weird that a flying vehicle can machine gun down a tank on the ground but complaining about that is like complaining that the free cookies you’re getting are chocolate chip instead of peanut butter.
Where did that enemy plane come from?
If the game was just flying around and bombing factories it would be another bland shooter and probably would have gotten that thumbs down I initially wanted to give this one. But just when you think you’ve got things figured out the game throws a wrench into the works.
Suddenly a plane comes out of nowhere and will start to attack you. But that’s not even the worst part. The plane doesn’t even really care all that much about you.
What it does care about is getting rid of your carrier. The screen flashes, you have alerts sounding, and you’ve got to get back to where you started in order to save the carrier from being destroyed.
Technically there’s a two player mode. I tried it. I don’t get it. I was playing with myself so maybe it would have helped if someone was playing with me.
Once you destroy all six factories you win the level and get to do it all again, harder of course.
Obviously this isn’t as good as 1942 or Gradius. On the bright side, it’s a metric-ton better than Section Z. But then again, that’s not really hard to pull off.
- One of these days I’m going to get around for these discussions for another time. But we’ll get to that later. [↩]
THE BAY!
It’s crazy, but I’m going to compare this to food. Calamari actually.
I started off not liking it. But I had to eat it because I would send it out at work and it was always making me want to spit it back out.
But now, I’m actually starting to like it. It’s crazy.
Chris recently published the post Lode Runner
This wouldn’t have meant anything to the average kid in 1987, but this is now mostly noteworthy for being Will Wright’s first game.
And the box art always reminded me of the poster for Dario Argento’s Inferno: http://horror-movies.wikia.com/wiki/Inferno
Dr. Sparkle recently published the post The Evil Desires of Dr. Sparkle
Netflix says I should watch that. It just showed up in the past week or so.
Chris recently published the post Star Voyager
It’s worth noting this was Will Wright’s first game.
Hearing that again reminds me of how I used to see SimCity 2000 in Toys R Us and how stupid I thought that was to have as a SNES game. But I never had a SNES until a few months ago so there was never any question of if I’d buy it or not.
I guess I’ll have to finally play it if I decide to do SNES after I finish all the NES stuff.
It’s always nice when a NES game surprises you, especially if you think it’s going to suck at first. Sadly, these are almost as rare as an Earthbound Zero prototype cart.
Also, the word “Bungle” makes me laugh.
Keep up the good work man!!