Shockman

released on Apr 27, 1991

It's been two years since Arnold and Sonya were made into Shockmen. A message from the professor to return to their bodies has them head to his laboratory, but they are ambushed by a mysterious enemy along the way. After narrowly defeating the enemy, they catch a TV news flash announcing the Ryo Empire invasion. They find that the professor has been abducted and set out to rescue him. Shockman is a side-view action shooter that has eight stages, including Action Stages, where you jump and use special techniques, and side-scrolling Shooting Stages. This game expands on the well-paced story from the previous version and contains cooperative elements like shared life and a powerful Team Shockbeam that can be used during two-player simultaneous play.


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Fui botar só pra testar o emulador e acabei indo até o fim dele no mesmo dia. É facinho até demais, mas pelo menos também é muito adorável. Fiquei imaginando que com algumas adições poderia se tornar um jogo muito mais interessante, como por exemplo se tivesse uma variedade maior de ataques e inimigos mais complexos. Bom, foi uma experiência breve e divertida pelo visual, música e personagens.

ahhh dont you miss old school game design
it was a simpler time where you get through the first level just fine and then the second level will throw some half baked gimmick underwater level at you and then you'll need to precisely dodge obstacles with pixel precision that takes out almost all of your health, leaving you to fight the boss, one hit away from death without heals, and then when you die one single time its game over and you go back to the menu
and then even if you do make it through all that in one life, your reward is a boring sidescroller sewer level that occasionally throws one of 3 enemies at you very slowly

cause i don't miss that
i don't miss that at all
a megaman clone aint worth that shit

The vivid artstyle swap, linear structure and switch to Mega Man-esque gameplay is wholly more appropriate this time, yet it somehow felt worse than Shubibiman 1? A matter of aiming higher and falling lower. The sound direction is so tame, all the SFX are quiet as hell and the music is much more generic. There's little thought to these enemy and boss designs, making for a terrible grab bag of walking targets and untouchable death gods. Checkpoints become embarrassingly distant from each other as you progress, with one stage requiring you to do 3 stages worth of platforming and bosses before securing your progress. It's evil.

No game should make me wish it played more like Valis.

Idk, I really hope one of the remaining games from this series turns out good. The concept of spoofing henshin/toku media without acutally satirizing it is very appealing to me, and I love these cute, dorky characters. Gotta defend that Girls-With-Robot-Antenna-Ears representation.

I had a lot of hope that this one would be better than the first game. I don't think the first game was bad but it was close. (Edit: This opinion has changed after this review was made). You might be wondering, first game? Yeah this is actually a sequel to a japan only game called Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman. For some reason they skipped it here and brought the sequel instead. Is it any better then the first one? Not really.

Thankfully the map system of the previous game was ditched to be a linear focused game. You can shoot in multiple directions and can even charge. The controls still aren't great but they're much better then last time. At least your speed is much better, it was horrible in the first game.

That said though this game is sloppy. There's level design that's not only repetitive but very uninteresting. The game has some questionable moments that make you wonder how much playtesting was done on this game and sometimes this game just wants to waste your time with slow auto scrollers or doing the same thing the game already made you do in that level.

But that's all nothing compared to the shmup sections. These are horrible. It really says a lot about these when it felt more optimal to not bother shooting enemies. These honestly might be some of the worst I've seen from the genre. It's got slow movement, stuff you just can't destroy, awful collision detection, no power ups, and you only have one life. Yeah this goes for the whole game, if you die once back to the beginning of the level with you.

The bosses are so inconsistent in quality that it baffles me. Some of them can be a little challenging but then there are some that just have such easy safespots that again I ask was this even playtested. The final boss is so anticlimatic and worse of all when I beat it, it just kept going and I was so confused. It only died once it went further to the right like what, I don't get this at all...

So even with all that said, what makes it not bad? Well I guess the foundation of the gameplay isn't too awful. If I could have read the dialogue which btw goes way too fast, it probably has an OK story. Always like when these kind of games have throwaway stories it's just I like the effort regardless. When it's not being bad it can be decent I guess, you can do worse.

The game looks alright, it's not good in my opinion but hey it could be worse. I like the designs of the characters once again though I swear the professor guy reminds me of someone but now I forgot, damnit. The music is not enjoyable to me personally, I think some of it sounds bad personally. The voices are neat though but nothing special.

You know writing this down, it's probably shocking to people I even gave it a 5/10. It's like barely better than the first game but it's problems are different to the previous game, it's so weird. It's such a shame because I wanna like it like I do the Rockman series but I just don't. There is still another PC Engine game but I'm not having too much hope for it. If it gets higher than a 5/10, I will be very surprised.

Gosh, y'know I just...this little thing was so slippery to control. The little robot gal was adorable but goodness gracious I just couldn't get a hold of this. It looks adorable though!

Average follow-up to a lackluster debut. Graphics, controls have been updated although slippery walk persists. Large bosses, boring stages, overall mediocre experience.