Bio-Ship Paladin is a very strange game - enormously slow, with a defensive gameplay style similar to missile command. It drags on for an incredible length of time, not just from the perspective of the slow scrolling and movement, but also the sheer number of stages (there's like ten) and the fact that the game only has like 3 songs. As other players have noted, it's comically rigid, full of random ambushes that seem bafflingly impossible for you to dodge the first time through. (The boss of Stage 3 comes to mind). And yet, there's something weirdly engrossing about the whole experience.

I guess that fundamentally, the way the game is just so different from any other shmup I've ever played appeals to me. I think the idea of a game like Bio-Ship Paladin but with a bit more budget and thought put into it would be extremely cool. What I find most interesting about the game, though, is this sort of... uh... Dark Souls - esque "you WILL die, deal with it" energy to the whole game, the exact same thing that makes it frustrating to play. It's kind of... I hate to say this, because it's obviously incredibly silly to refer to a hyper-idealized genre game this way... realistic?

Okay, okay, so I know you're probably scratching your head at that. What I mean is, Bio-Ship Paladin feels like plodding battleship combat more than speedy movie thriller action 90% of the time. The bosses are of a classic style where instead of shifting from form to more and more dynamic form, instead they usually start out with a ton of weapons that you shred off of them until they're pitiful, so the fights start out overwhelmingly hard and become easy once you've deleted all your opponent's gun turrets. And that sort of all-or-nothing, throwing everything you've got at your opponent, hoping its enough combat really reminds me of how real combat works... There's a sense of sad, trudging, despair-filled warfare in Paladin that's exacerbated by the grimy Genesis palette and the simple, melancholy soundtrack. In the end titles of the game you're presented with a listing of all the bosses you fought the entire time, and in an extremely unusual move, every boss has a listed crew count. There's no visible humans in the game at all, no cool protagonists babbling "Let's attack aggressively!" in lieu of a plot or fulfilling the local cute anime girl quota, no intro cutscene explaining the stakes, the only presence of humanity is their reduction to numbers in the end, a quiet procession of kill counts. More than anything that's what makes this feel like a depiction of heartless warfare to me, the casual mention of the fact that hundreds of people were manning the death-raining war machines that your two pilots had to shoot down and kill. It's pretty interesting.

Oh, speaking of two pilots. I think my favorite thing about Paladin was playing it with my brother. It's much easier as a two-player game for obvious reasons, a single player has to constantly switch modes to play the game (no twin stick capabilities on the Genesis!) which makes it way harder to handle all the ambushes it throws at you. But with two players you have the added element of communication, you actually have to talk to your partner to discuss threats and priorities. This is another aspect that feels powerfully simulationist, like an early 20th century warplane pilot having to get the help of their gunner. Bio-Ship Paladin is simultaneously a sterile space battle game where machines trade lasers with other machines without a human in sight, and a game defined entirely by the idea that to some degree, even if you can't see it, those mechanical behemoths are all about the people within them. Thousands die. That's life!

Also I like the thing where your ship gets larger and easier to hit as you get more health. Thanks for reading.

I had to go back and play another few old NES Shmups again to really crystallize my opinion on Hector. It's an interesting game full of personality, with beautiful sprites and varied enemies and bosses appearing before you. You can certainly tell that a lot of effort went into the game, and the Zanac-like gameplay is decently engrossing. The music is very nice, and the historic ruins flavor for the game is awesome - I do wish the lore felt more consistent, but at least it's overall a neat product.

The real problem is unfortunately the punishing difficulty, or at least the way it's established. Hector's specific style of gameplay involves hurling lots of enemies with very specific and weird patterns at you, a sort of older version of hectic shmup design where instead of massive amounts of bullets it's just a few guys who move way way too fast in too many different ways on screen. The first level already introduces you to a punishing style where your suspiciously kind-feeling euroshmuppy life bar is promptly rendered totally pointless by aggressive homing enemies that slam into you as an insta-kill, and then the second stage puts you in bizarrely difficult sections with enemies bounding about every part of the screen in ways that are essentially too fast for you to really react to. I think the actual enemy ideas are very good, and the designs are cool, but the specific synthesis of its parts is so aggressively mind-numbing in combination with the punishing checkpointing that I have no idea how people beat this properly. It doesn't just feel like trial and error, but like trial and error that only lets you get an attempt to learn it after surviving like a minute of work that taxes your brain to get back to a certain point, and it already starts doing that by two levels in.

The bosses are interesting and unique designs, although they have the unfortunate curse of many NES era bosses in that they really only do one specific thing. Super rigid bosses where you learn a trick or two are at least reasonable given, again, extremely mean checkpointing, but it does get a little frustrating. A lot of them are also immense damage sponges, so it's hard to tell if you're actually playing them properly - the Egyptian boss for instance I had no idea if I was properly hitting or making some awkward mistake with. There's a reason later games would often have enemies flash when hit, especially with Hector having multiple sounds it can play depending on the enemy in question. The final boss is also a very classic design in that its one attack is horrifically incomprehensible to dodge at first and honestly just in general, creating a sort of FF3 Cloud of Darkness type situation where it's like "Is that it?" as you get blasted to pieces again and again. There's also not really that much fanfare leading up to it or during the fight, which is pretty unfortunate - a unique boss theme, or some specific indications that this was the center of the opponent's force, would have been nice. The last level does have unique graphics, but it doesn't really scream "this is the last level" in the way a lot of other shmups were able to do...

Overall, Hector is a game I find interesting and cute, but if I have to rate it honestly, I just don't think it's anywhere near as fair or reasonable to learn as several of its contemporaries. There's certainly depth to it, the levels are nice, the bosses are good, but the difficulty is punishing in such a specific mind-breaking way and I don't really feel like it rewards your time spent with it. They clearly spent a lot of effort on it, but it just isn't quite there. It's the kind of game I think would be cool to make a fangame version of, though, or something like that.

But yeah, great art and music. And I love that it's called Hector. Thanks for reading.