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.

Quartet 2 - Arcade

Let the poncy title games, begin!

For an old game there's a little bit of charm still left in this one. Quartet 2, in which we adopt the Gauntlet model of gaming and having several colour coded players running around the levels but instead we drop it to a 2D platformer, throw in some guns and weapons, some physical powerups and so on.

As opposed to a chicken, that would be original at least.

From the off, in Quartet 2, you get to choose from Caucasian guy 1, Caucasian guy 2, Caucasian Girl and Complimentary Black Guy, running by the names of Lee, Joe, Mary and Edgar and their photos looking like some offcut designs from the original Dragonball series of anime. I'm guessing this line up was done for the thinking "White Male most popular demographic so let's have two of those, then throw in some others 'just in case' someone wants to use them". Though having said that, they all do have slightly different weapons and slightly different weapons during upgrades.

Lots of enemies, lots of action and fairly smoothe too!

The premise is simple enough in Quartet 2, start the level, travel to the end and kill the boss that holds the key, then leave via the door. On the way you may find various power ups in the guise of jetpacks, higher jumping, more points, weapon upgrades and such. Also found within the levels are bouncing orbs that can be shot to cycle through colours, giving rise to the possibility of gaining weapon upgrades if you collect it with your characters main colour being selected, or just more points. However, upgrading your weapon too many times resets it back to the first point, which may or may not be a boon or hindrance depending upon your character, but gives you an incentive to hunt for more orbs.

Special weapons for each person, but who really cares?

However, you also have a limit on health and while the game plays, your health drops steadily. Getting hit, shot, or just collided with by the enemies will plummet your health to dangerously low levels and dropping to zero is the end game situation for your character unless you want to pump in another credit and keep playing.

Joe will win the day, with his stupid quiff

Given the time and technology available, Quartet 2 is proudly holding the "Cartoony" appearance because it really can't be doing anything else with such limited capacity. However you can expect the rooms and levels to be flooded with enemies from time to time with no slow-down happening in the game. Monsters, as cartoony as one can make them, spawn periodically and endlessly from key spawn doorways and trapdoors to hamper our characters progress while the boss will take multiple hits before going down, increasing in speed and threat until that point.

Mary in red, dancing with me... Cheek to cheek...

The sounds within Quartet 2 are quite chirpy and cheerful for the music, tripping along to an almost easy-going set of musical scores while the blippy noises and beepy squeakies give the game a certain charm that improves to the overall experience in that this is rather innocent little game before the times of blood, guts, gore and games taking that "dark" and "edgy" approach, it's cute and cheerful and for all intents and purposes could be a game show of the future.

It looks complicated, most of it can be ignored and just gun it for the key.

Overall, Quartet isn't a bad game but it's not a great game. There's too many times that you'll find your character dropping all of their items after colliding with an enemy (including the door key) and having to backtrack to get them and then dropping it again when you arrive back to the same enemy now that it has respawned and sits awaiting to fuck up your day the same way it already has done so. Give it a try however if you see it around, the responsive controls may let you feel for the days when playable games were all that a game really needed to be without relying on gimmicks and sexualisation.

Xybots - Arcade

How... do you pronounce that?

Take 2 players, drop them into a maze filled with increasingly more difficult layouts and monsters/robots and make it part Third Person Shooter and you've effectively got yourself Xybots.

It's quite a bit daunting at the start

In taking from possibly the idea of Gauntlet but giving us an "in maze" view rather than the typical top-down view, Xybots not only takes the approach of giving us warning messages the first time anything new happens, much like in Gauntlet, but it also lets us see the action happening in the playing field. The view itself is split up into 3 parts. One screen for player 1, one screen for player 2 and the rest of the screen, which is the upper half, is dedicated to stats, layouts and the map for both players.

And then the difficulty kicks in

Play takes place for Xybots in the same arena for each player. As the players move and progress through the maze, they'll gradually map the maze out from their views. Sometimes players start together, sometimes they don't but they ideally have to find the same exit (and there's warps to other levels too). This leads to possible routes of attack where players can flank and ambush enemies that have specifically-directional shields. In other cases this isn't a good idea as the game may flag up that shooting each other will hurt and most hits take 10% of your ever-fading life bar.

Maps and sensors, though costly, will save a lot of time.

Yep, Xybots is one of those countdown games where the longer you take, the less health you'll have in the next round and such. However the game is unique with its control system in that not only do you navigate with the joystick to move forwards, backwards, sidestepping left and right, but turning is done by twisting the top of the control to turn 90 degrees either left or right depending upon the direction turned. If you're not aware the game can do this, you'll find several first few maps that have you running sideways down a corridor until you either learn it, get killed or miraculously get to the end of the corridor while being shot at.

Some enemies have shields, some fire back. Beware those that have both functions.

Enemies are the rather non-descript entities ranging from spaceships that pick up items and move them around, including coins which are used to buy things at the end of levels, health, keys, weapons and so on. Large robots that move and shoot at you while taking several hits to be killed fully, smaller robots that take similar hits but can selectively use shields to block and fire, insect looking things that move almost erratically and hammer the player with a huge level of shots while they themselves can only be shot at JUST the right time. Every now and then you get to meet a Master Xybot which needs to be shot repeatedly in key places to succeed and losing will knock you back some 10 or so levels. Sounds very fair to me.

Each new event gets a lovely little (annoying) message about it!

Speaking of sounds, the music in the game takes a very lacklustre approach and while it doesn't overwhelm the ambience of the game, there's plenty of room for extra that could be better used to build upon the mechanics of the game. While the sounds are the usual bleep and bloops we've come to expect from this time period, it's interesting to behold the digitised speech mechanic within the game. Otherwise it's clear that most of the focus has gone into the graphics of the game and the gameplay.

And there's bosses too... Good luck.

It's a fun game initially though the first few levels are a little too gradual on the difficulty curve while later levels will ramp it up to becoming a vertical way that eventually flexes back upon itself. Stick to it a little and have someone competent playing alongside you and you'll do well to enjoy this game.