I accidentally flimflammed myself into buying a reproduction of this off Retrobit/LRG a bit ago, I preordered last year when I still had some inkling of hope of getting more physical Genesis/MD games, until I just gave up and used my Everdrive Pro that I initially got to play SCD games with less moving parts involved.
"Guy r' Us", "Gary's", or whatever you want to pronounce it has it all with it's presentation. It's got all the parallax scrolling, all the giant boss sprites, all the graphical nonsense for a 1990 release to make the old school tech nerds squee like comedy relief anime schoolgirls. Even if I begrudgingly found a bunch of the backgrounds distracting on my CRT setup, I still found them pleasing. It's why it's even more disappointing that I find the gameplay itself excruciating and downright torturous at times. It's really not a good look when I find Super R-Type's philosophy of sending you all the way back after dying to it's stage boss to be less annoying than the checkpoint system in Gaiares. They exist, but they send you back more than far enough for it to strain your emotional state and the ruthless enemy patterns really don't compliment this system at all. There's plenty of times where I found myself getting shut off from all escape from the enemy patterns with my only choice being to either die, or hope I had a shield on to absorb the hit. There's difficulty and then there's just punishment that drains my will to play longer, and that's saying a lot from the NES Ninja Gaiden apologist.
I need to give a special shoutout to some of the mini-boss design that's basically "shoot bullets, then suddenly bumrush forward with zero warning", a tactic straight out of Gadget Twins, which is an absolutely scathing insult I can throw at Gaiares. If I can find a way to compare your shmup to Gadget Twins then you've failed, I'm sorry. Go to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 didgeridoos. Go to your room and stay there. And of course, what else could the final stage be, but a boss rush? I let Gradius get away with that shit due to actually using different bosses, but come on, do I really need to fight the robo-bitch with the sword and shield again when I just killed her in the last stage? She's awful.
I'm convinced that so-called "Boomer Gamers", aka the gamers that are somehow older than me that played these games just fell in love with the cool grim reaper boss in stage 3, and jerked it to the naked anime lady on the JP cover. It's a shame. When I personally see Gaiares I don't see a cult classic or sleeper hit from the 16-bit generation, instead I see wasted potential.
Hate to echo the sentiments of other regular backloggers here, but I agree with them. "Queen Zz Badnasty" is probably the best thing from this game.
"Guy r' Us", "Gary's", or whatever you want to pronounce it has it all with it's presentation. It's got all the parallax scrolling, all the giant boss sprites, all the graphical nonsense for a 1990 release to make the old school tech nerds squee like comedy relief anime schoolgirls. Even if I begrudgingly found a bunch of the backgrounds distracting on my CRT setup, I still found them pleasing. It's why it's even more disappointing that I find the gameplay itself excruciating and downright torturous at times. It's really not a good look when I find Super R-Type's philosophy of sending you all the way back after dying to it's stage boss to be less annoying than the checkpoint system in Gaiares. They exist, but they send you back more than far enough for it to strain your emotional state and the ruthless enemy patterns really don't compliment this system at all. There's plenty of times where I found myself getting shut off from all escape from the enemy patterns with my only choice being to either die, or hope I had a shield on to absorb the hit. There's difficulty and then there's just punishment that drains my will to play longer, and that's saying a lot from the NES Ninja Gaiden apologist.
I need to give a special shoutout to some of the mini-boss design that's basically "shoot bullets, then suddenly bumrush forward with zero warning", a tactic straight out of Gadget Twins, which is an absolutely scathing insult I can throw at Gaiares. If I can find a way to compare your shmup to Gadget Twins then you've failed, I'm sorry. Go to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 didgeridoos. Go to your room and stay there. And of course, what else could the final stage be, but a boss rush? I let Gradius get away with that shit due to actually using different bosses, but come on, do I really need to fight the robo-bitch with the sword and shield again when I just killed her in the last stage? She's awful.
I'm convinced that so-called "Boomer Gamers", aka the gamers that are somehow older than me that played these games just fell in love with the cool grim reaper boss in stage 3, and jerked it to the naked anime lady on the JP cover. It's a shame. When I personally see Gaiares I don't see a cult classic or sleeper hit from the 16-bit generation, instead I see wasted potential.
Hate to echo the sentiments of other regular backloggers here, but I agree with them. "Queen Zz Badnasty" is probably the best thing from this game.
3 Comments
I’d vouch but dont recall enjoying any of the bosses that i actually remember lol
Honestly, not much of this game was enjoyable thanks to it's systems lol. Wish I liked the capture mechanic more, it's neat but also hard to appreciate when the game's making you replay the same stretch of level 500 times.
Angel_Arle
1 year ago