Zero Wing - Arcade

Someone set us up the bomb!

All your base are belong to us, Gentlemen make your time and a whole host of other such bad translations are what plagued the Megadrive/genesis version of this game, but now we have just the arcade version which features solely the gameplay and no shoehorned plots and cut scenes that the console version has.

In AD 2101, War was beginning

With that, what we have is a solid, if a little long, scrolling spaceship shooter. Bright and colourful graphics adorn the gameplay while you're zipping through space collecting powerups, speedups and massive bombs while negating around weapons, enemies, projectiles and some VERY large bosses.

CATS: How are you gentlemen!!!

For plot, there's little to realise in Zerowing beyond you leaving an exploding space station and... That's it, you're off! Into the large black abyss that is "The Space" and you're flying from left to right and taking on all comers in a massive battle royal of you vs. everyone else. On your way you have the lovely little ability to shoot and use a sort of tractor beam that lets you capture small and medium sized enemies and then launch them at others or use them as a shield.

Operator: We get signal

Zerowing's powerups come in several flavours of primary light colours, red for spread shooting, blue for lasers and green for homing shots. Get enough of the same colour and you'll power up through levels of 3 shot, to 5 shot and then 7 shot (except for lasers, they just get fatter) while your 2 pods will also stop most attacks and even destroy smaller enemies for you. You can be seriously kitted out in a short amount of time.

You are on the way to destruction!

Which you'll need for Zerowing as the levels can be extensively long and it's not until you destroy the 2nd boss-looking monster that you're actually told it's the next level. Bosses are not introduced with any fanfare, the music doesn't change, they just turn up and you're fighting them while usually the normal enemies are still trying to swarm you. It's almost as if someone added bosses and then forgot to recognise them as bosses.

Take off every 'ZIG'

The controls in Zerowing are fairly responsive though you do have that issue of trying to control a spacecraft that's going too fast if you're not careful in picking up those bonus items. However, there's the issue also of the dying and being grossly underpowered as a result of not having the firepower needed to take on the onslaught of multiple weapons from a myriad of opponents.

CATS: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...

The music for Zerowing is a little simplistic and repeats throughout each level but has the good sense and grace to change with the levels. Sadly some of those levels are EXTREMELY long, take up 2-3 bosses before being defeated or can be won out within a single simple boss. There's an inconsistent pattern about the design and it shows.

Captain: ... For great justice

There's flaws in the game, there's great aspects too with the level design and the fairly constant difficulty curve that's in place. There's plenty of challenge and given the age of the game, quite an extensive set of levels and gameplay on offer for the studious and hardworking gamer. Certainly worth a play just to see some of the bigger bosses and inventive designs for them.

Gigawing - Arcade, Dreamcast

If it moves, shoot it, meh, shoot it anyway.

Also released upon the Dreamcast, Gigawing is definitely one of those Bullet-Hell vertical shooter spaceship games. While I have reviewed several in this series of ABC Arcades, it's something to behold and a very special game in that it's just so over the top and overblown with crazy and madness.

LOOKOUT! There's a hint of plot here.

Let's start with the basics. Gigawing has the lovely shooty button. It lets you shoot the bullets and beams at the naughty things trying to end your game prematurely. Tapping the shooty button lets you fire repeatedly and constantly, however, if you hold the button down, you activate a psychokinetic shield capable of reversing the polarity of all energy-based projectiles, inversing angle, acceleration and force to send the aforementioned projectile on an inverse trajectory towards the point of origin, causing impact and sustained structural damage to the recipient whilst spawning a collectible icon that increases and amplifies the point-based reward system implemented by the game. Or, it sends bullets back to enemies and turns into bonus points.

Score rating: Stupid. Soon to become, CRAZY AND DUMB!

You also get a wealth of bombs with Gigawing which regenerate upon death and can be picked up, these bombs (along with using the shield in the aforementioned paragraph) cause a huge level of damage to everything as well as a focused attack in the centre of the screen upon bigger enemies/bosses. This combination of bombs and regenerating shields, can help you survive most of the game with very little time actually spent on surviving the bullet hell parts of the levels. Until you run out of bombs.

Use your reflection shield to turn their bullets into your bullets. Try not to get confused.

Gigawing has the lovely choice of four different crafts and pilots. Each one with their own story and style of attack. What becomes more interesting is that the planes and characters will interact with each other to form new storylines depending on who plays as which character and whether you're doing well or not. Each character has their own reasons for getting involved, be it the loss of a loved one, protecting others or just for shits and giggles. Perhaps not the best reason but it's one I can happily subscribe to.

Between me and the boss, not sure who's firing more shots here.

The first 3 levels are determined by the character choice but levels 4-6 (and maybe 7 if you're good) are always in their respective orders. The display and visual aesthetics behind the levels are stunning. Bullets tend to come in blue and pink fluorescence while MOST gold coloured things are points (careful later on), the appearance and background of everything in levels is staggering. Regrettably you'll never see it thanks to the chaos going on within the level itself. It's really manic and if you manage to get a breather you can view some of the most intricate and detailed designs to grace a game, but as said already, it's a shame you'll only see it if you're dead.

The returning boss, and maybe the super last boss if you're good at this game.

Enemies are quite varied in Gigawing, ranging from spaceships to submarines, to medallion embued bosses and almost everything can spunk out a cloud of bullets and attacks that you can almost instantly return back to them but you will see times where EVERYTHING on the screen is a bullet of sorts and bosses are certainly no exception to this rule. Bosses, in truth, go one step further and seem to not only spam bullets left and right but also in curiously interesting patterns that leaves me wondering upon the mathematic formulae to create such patterns, while I'm trying to blow them up.

Because shooting everything needs context...

The music in Gigawing fits perfectly. Lead and Synths for industrial levels, serene and calm tones for the more picturesque levels, suitably manic mid-boss fight music and boss music that makes you wake up and take note "HERE'S A BOSS!" with a clash of synths worth of any video-game gladiator entering the ring for combat. Assuming the gladiator runs straight in for a kill rather than pontificating about the arena declaring their worth and self-value or just being a dick in general.

This thing will throw more bullets at you than you've seen so far in the entire game.

Overall, it's fun quick game that doesn't get too painful too quickly and with the incredibly ridiculous scoring system, won't cause too much of an issue in the fact that it's bright, colourful and fast paced on the action (so fast in some cases it suffers slow-down on account of how MUCH is going on in the game) but it's still worth while viewing or grabbing it on the Dreamcast.

Terminator: SkyNET - PC/DOS

T-800 is going to shoot you in the FACE!

The Terminator franchise has a lot going for it and sadly not a lot really been done all that well with it, arguably beyond the second film. The potential to have stories of multiple Terminators being sent back and forth to fight and protect various people has been played around with by the comic books and the films mash up a few things here and there that the TV series ignores and acknowledges in multiple incongruous ways. Terminator SkyNET, is the follow up to the original Terminator Future Shock (Of which I'll likely review next week).

Unlike the films, the shotgun is rather effective.

The idea is simple (ish...) enough, it's set after the wars, after the first two films and based in the future where you, Captain McNoFace and Generic Hero WITH a voice (little off-putting actually) are already in the Resistance and fighting alongside John Connor, Saviour of the Human Race from deadly robots. It pays a level of homage to the source material which makes slightly more sense with that context. Rather than pumping humans and robots back through time, this game deals with having to confront the eponymous SkyNET and stop one of its plans.

Battling robots amongst skeletons of old buildings.

You start with a selection of nice weapons from the start including grenades, pipe bombs, an Uzi, Assault Rifle, Shotgun and Plasma Rifle with slight zoom scope based on the first film. (This actually was ground breaking in that you began the game with more than Sweet Fuck All but more about that later). You're tasked with running into a robot compound filled with murderous robots that aren't too happy that you're alive and fleshy and will try to make you relatively unfleshy as soon as possible. It's here that you do a bit of snooping around with all the subtlety of a suicide bomber. Upon which you find the super secret weapon... A nuke.

Found it? Wasn't exactly well hidden now was it?

For those that don't know, nukes caused all this devastation in the first place and the super weapon is to use the same weapon again. So for a computer that can calculate how to traverse time and space, seems someone left the Read-Only option on for the "Learning Lessons" section of the AI. Either way, it's your mission soon to investigate which nuke this is (Like it matters?), find out how and where to disable it if possible, attempt to take it out and finally get yourself to where it is and disable it in a series of 8 or so missions. This will also involve driving cars around and flying one of the Hunter Killer machines to get this done.

There's quite a variety of Terminators in the game.

Terminator SkyNET uses and slightly improves upon the previous engine of the game with a little extra in the physics department (Bouncing grenades) and manages to also negate issues like game flags not triggering where multiple options are not performed in EXACTLY the right way and time. As such the missions in this game aren't exactly that difficult or taxing beyond "Find place, hit button, run for it" though some of the layouts require taking a BIG leap of faith (Looking at you level 3... and your bullshit building jumping madness) and some are just a straightforward slog through the environment.

Bigger guns please!

Given the time and capacity of the engine, SkyNET makes a very good go at giving a real sense of doom and gloom with the game's graphics and appearance. Locations look destroyed and the inclusion of pockets of radiation do take away any real sense of accomplishment in that if you win or lose, this planet is still looking like a Scorched Earth situation. Buildings can be entered to scavenge for supplies but will require a loading screen that takes the edge off the immersion a little while derelicts can be trawled through to find dead soldier's supplies here and there and to get higher vantage points in the game. Bonus points to the game for including the night club from the first film complete with hologram dancers and lots of dead bodies.

Yes, the legs WILL keep coming for you.

The music and sounds in the game compliment SkyNET with various remixes and rehashes of Brad Fiedel's famous composition for the film The Terminator. While the guns sound hefty and meaty and add to the feeling that you're packing a punch with these implements of robot-dismantling. It's a shame though that the graphics haven't fared too well over the years as this would be a good game to return to from time to time. Having said that it remains a solid game with a key flaw to it...

Get ready for bad acting in cutscenes.

Overall, the game is a patch that was released as a standalone. This set of missions should have been part of the original game and formed a cohesion in the main story rather than being as it is here, a set of side-missions masquerading as a full game in itself. Though having said that, it does remain a rather plot driven, plot focused game with no hints on how to achieve objectives beyond the initial blurb of the introduction to the mission, so there's no way points or guides on the HUD, you have to work it out for yourself. Not that THAT is a bad thing, it just would be nice if the game was longer or part of the original and followed the initial intentions laid out for this add-on pack turned full title.