It’s a shoot ‘em up masquerading as a run & gun. Play as literally Arnold or Sigourney to take down cybernetic beings brought into earth by aliens?

I thought it was cool, albeit Nintendo hard in difficulty. The hit detection is forgiving considering the side of an upright character with scrolling often shifting from horizontal to vertical axis.

The shooting gimmick in this game is largely the power-ups and the secondary shots which can be rotated and locked into direction, it’s a lot slower than something like MUSHA and more “clock-like” in its movements.

Terrible name aside, this is a thoroughly average shooter with a somewhat unique mechanic when it comes to your options. A tap of the button will lock them into place, and another tap will have them moving free-form around the player. Although it says Natsume on the title screen, it's obvious this is a Konami game from the pause music and the fact that the player sprite is pretty much stolen from Contra. Unlike most shooters you have a life bar but with how incredibly big the hitbox it drains faster than a PS5 controller's battery.

I think the biggest problem was with the length of the levels. There are only five, but they drag on forever, with the last stage probably being the biggest offender. Still, there's some fun to be had but I'd highly recommend playing Forgotten Worlds and the Trouble Shooter duo first. They're basically better versions of what this was going for.

Have you ever wanted to see a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigourney Weaver team up and battle aliens together to save the planet Earth in the distant future? Well, unfortunately, that movie doesn’t exist (in a perfect reality, it would), but thankfully, we have a game that is the closest thing we will ever get to that reality, known as S.C.A.T.: Special Cybernetic Attack Team. This is yet another obscure NES title from Natsume that I just happened to try out when looking through the library on the NSO, and I had some expectations for what I was getting into, considering my previous experiences with Journey to Sillius and Shadow of the Ninja. It may have a pretty stupid cover, but it should have gameplay that is good enough to make you ignore that cover, and it won’t last too long, so that it doesn’t feel like a burden to try to complete. Thankfully, most of those expectations were correct, as I did find the game to be good enough, even if it wasn’t really all that original, and it doesn’t offer much to experience other than the strange parallels that exist in it.

The story is basically what I said earlier, with it taking place in the year 2029, so I can see now that this takes place in the same universe as Shadow of the Ninja, the graphics are pretty average, having no real stand-out bad or good qualities about it, looking pretty much like every other average NES game at the time, the music is pretty good, but again, it is a pretty standard sounding soundtrack for the NES, with plenty of sound effects and noises we have heard before, so it offers nothing that will catch your attention, the control is good all around, feeling good to handle and not having any noticeable issues, and the gameplay is pretty unique for those who haven’t experienced anything like it before, but for those who are well aware of other games like this at the time, you would know that this is a straight-up copy of other games.

The game is basically just a lesser version of Forgotten Worlds by Capcom, and when you take a look at the two games side-by-side, you can really tell. You take control of either Arnold or Sigourney (yeah, those are their actual names, so that question from the beginning had a purpose), fly through several auto-scrolling stages, using a standard weapon and two “options” to take down enemies and obstacles that you run into, get weapon upgrades to experiment with and more health along the way as you shoot more things, and take on challenging enough bosses that will test your skills… somewhat. So yeah, if you didn’t pick up on it by now, this is pretty much EXACTLY how Forgotten Worlds plays, except without a shop to purchase upgrades, and you can only shoot in two directions rather than eight. From what I had researched, apparently this game was made “in the vein” of that game, as well as Section Z, so I don’t wanna assume that they were stealing from those games, but I dunno… seeing this gameplay, coupled with how they just inserted both Arnold and Sigourney as the main characters, it is pretty suspicious.

Aside from those pretty apparent similarities to those other games, if we were to ignore those, then the game itself is painfully average. At its core, there is nothing about the game that would make it stand out from any other NES game on the market, and if you were to have played any other NES game before this one, then you really wouldn’t be missing out if you were to ignore this one. It just seems like Natsume were the kings of making the most average-ass games imaginable for this system back in the day, which do nothing wrong, and can be a bit of fun, but they do nothing else, playing it way too safe, ultimately resulting in them just being a “whatever” batch of games.

Now, that’s not to say that these games are completely worthless, and don’t warrant your attention at all, because that isn’t the case. The game is still fun enough, having enough to entertain you for a good half-an-hour, and I imagine, if this was your first exposure to the NES, or the type of gameplay that Forgotten Worlds had to offer, then I’d imagine you would consider this your own personal favorite. Maybe even a hidden gem of yours, if you’d be bold enough to claim. And if that is the case, then more power to you, but for me, as someone who has played so many of these types of games at this point, you have to do at least something to make yourself separate from other titles, it could be anything at all! And yes, Arnold and Sigourney are definitely somethings that can help in doing that, but it isn’t enough, making it so that this is a game will be one that I had fond memories of playing once, and then never touching again.

Overall, while having some stand-out elements like the main characters and the gameplay being Forgotten Worlds but for NES, this is just yet another average NES game with average gameplay, average graphics, average music, average EVERYTHING. I would recommend it to you if you are a big fan of the system, and you wanted to see everything it had to offer, or if you are just wanting to have something to speed through real quick to kill some time, but otherwise, you can just easily forget about this title and move on with your day. But, before I end this, I do wanna give myself a pat on the back, for not making a single obvious scat joke throughout this entire review. As someone who likes to make obvious jokes a lot, it is a rarity that I avoid one of them at all.

Game #319

I remember starting this back when it first launched on Switch Online and pretty immediately giving up on it. The game immediately throws you into a fairly chaotic scene without any efforts to introduce its structure or mechanics. Upon returning to it to give it a second shot, I actually completed it. It's a fun game! The unique feature here is the ability to control two orbs which constantly rotate around you. Since there are usually tons of enemies coming from every direction, it becomes a pretty involved mechanic to match the constant moving. However, despite some of these neat ideas, it suffers from what most shmups do, especially from this era, in that it runs out of ideas pretty quickly and starts to feel dull. It’s thankfully an overall short experience and not entirely difficult due to some generous hitboxes, but it still manages to feel dry by the end. This is better than most of the unknown garbage that floods NSO, however, and for that I guess I would consider myself “thankful”. 3/6

While I'm not well-versed in the "shmup" genre, I found S.C.A.T. to be pretty fun all things considered. There are obvious limitations seen in the game due to the hardware it was originally developed for, but for what it is, it's solid.

I wish I had to urge to finish it, though, since the gameplay largely doesn't evolve past the first mission; the only real difference is that there are just more projectiles; not what I'd call an engrossing enhancement of difficulty, per se.

Anyway, it's on Switch Online and for a brief, curious glance, it was worth the shot.