AKA Layer Section AKA Galactic Attack

Went in only knowing “its that shmup with the lock-on mechanic,” so I was taken off-guard by what a well-realized journey the game takes you on. There aren’t any intermissions or score breakdowns between levels, just a moment to decompress before the title of the next stage appears on-screen. It’s complemented well by how natural the transitions are, your ship breaking through the atmosphere or descending into the hollow world you’ve been sent to destroy.

There’s also a great tactile quality to everything, maybe best exemplified by the Stage 4 boss, a crab-thing that’s held up by four claws that can each be individually destroyed; go for score and you’ll need to endure a barrage of tough attacks, but take out the appendages on one side of the screen and you’ll send it plunging to an early death. Most of the game is full of these clever moments and surprisingly dynamic backgrounds, but as others have mentioned, there’s a pretty harsh difficulty spike when you get to Stage 6- the screen full of lasers and kamikaze drones that will happily eat through your credits.

I can almost buy this as an appropriate use of the setting, the exciting and detailed locales of the early levels giving way to sterile metallic corridors: a final, brutal line of defense before the last level. At the same time, it’s also hard to shake the, “Alright, you’ve had your fun, now get off the cab” feeling the crops at a similar place in many other arcade games. Maybe it’s just the fact that you can’t bomb, so there’s no way of recovering from being caught out, especially when you’re suddenly being bombarded with so many projectiles. Even more than most shmups, it’s a game that rewards multiple playthroughs, your chances of survival improving dramatically as you learn the choreography and start to preempt enemy waves with your lock-on.

But I imagine that these are issues that will fade with time, and didn’t detract much from my experience with it. In fact, I think this might be a new favorite of mine- left feeling like I had had a much fuller experience than the 30-minute runtime might hint at.

The modern day version of Virtua Fighter Remix is a lengthy apology tweet and two-to-three years of patches. In 1995, however, Remix released a year shy of the original launch edition of the game, given for free to Saturn owners as a big "we're sorry" for the base game's dire state. As such, copies of Remix are incredibly common, and if you're looking for a cheap and noteworthy Saturn game to add to your collection, it's an easy pick-up. I got mine bundled with Fighter's Megamix when I bought my Saturn off Ebay, and those are great games to start your library with, especially considering the console's strength as a "fighting game system."

However, Remix really only serves that purpose as an introduction or a curiosity. Being the early 3D fighter, it suffers from a lot of issues emblematic of the genre at that point in time, namely how chunky it is, and how it lacks the same level of depth and smoothness as its 2D fighting contemporaries. An important game and one that helped advanced the genre as a whole, for sure, but as rough around the edges as you'd expect. I mean, it's also no Battle Arena Toshinden Remix, but I see little reason to commit more time than necessary to glean what it accomplished and what its legacy is. By my estimation, that's roughly two hours on a Saturday morning, and back to the shelf it goes.

Never knew this game was like a new take on the Galaga series. I've always loved Galaga, it's in my top 5 Arcade games and this was a huge joy to play. It's like Galaga but even better. There's a lot of chaos happening especially in the later levels.

Some of the music is pretty good too and it's even got a boss at the end. It took me 17 credits to beat this one which isn't the worst job I guess. There's also a bonus game you play which can get hard later and personally I find the noise the make everytime you hit them gets kind of old.

With the different type of enemies and settings, it never gets stale and it's a fun 40 minute romp that I'm going to for sure replay someday. One of the best games I played this year. Maybe I need to play other Galaga sequels to see if I love them too.

It may be pretty obscure and generic when compared to many of the different shmups to have come out from the late 80’s to early 90’s, but all in all, the original Raiden was still a good enough time. It had fun and challenging gameplay, great weapons and weapon mechanics to mess around with, and it did feel immensely satisfying to get through some of these extremely challenging sections that were present in the game, despite arcade syndrome and its checkpoint system being a pain in the ass to deal with. Not only that, but it managed to do pretty well for itself as well, becoming one of the best-sellers for the arcade during its initial years, even if things were a tad slow at first, which meant that sequels were naturally going to follow. I mean, why not, it’s not like Seibu Kaihatsu had any other extremely popular games before this one… unless you are a huge fan of Dynamite Duke. But anyway, three years after the original game would come out, we would end up getting the sequel, Raiden II.

I wasn’t expecting too much out of this game, since it didn’t look like anything too impressive considering the screenshots I had seen from it, but I was hoping to get something noteworthy considering how long it took me to set it up. I had initially tried to get the game running on the totally legal Mame emulator, but I for the life of me couldn’t find the proper files for the rom online, whether it be due to roms not having it, or other websites preventing me from looking elsewhere because of my adblocker. So, eventually, I just decided to go with the version found on The Raiden Project, a collection for the PlayStation that features both Raiden 1 and 2 on it, with the port pretty much being one-to-one with the original arcade version. That was great to find, so I finally got the chance to jump into it, and what I got was… certainly more Raiden, alright. I would say it is better than the original Raiden, but that is only be a small margin, as in many ways, they are very similar in quality, but I did end up having a good enough time with the game anyway, so that is all that matters.

The story fills all the requirements of an arcade shmup sequel, where three years after their defeat, the Crystals return to take over Earth once again, thanks to the remnants of their machines forming a brand new army to take the planet over, so it is up to the Fighting Thunder to set out once again to take them down, which is about as generic as a sequel plot can get, but then again, I wasn’t expecting much from the story regardless. The graphics are practically identical to that of the original game, with only slight improvements seen here or there in terms of the icons and animations, but it still overall looks pretty good, the music is good, having plenty of decent tracks to listen to while blowing shit up, but nothing that managed to stick with me when I was done, and the control/gameplay is also practically identical to that of the original game, so any fan of the original can feel right at home with this game.

The game is a vertical scrolling shmup, where you take control of a Fighting Viper, go through eight different stages across several generic environments on Earth and in space, shoot down any enemy that comes your way using whatever weapons that you have at your disposal, gather plenty of different power ups and bombs to get yourself better equipped for the task, while also upgrading said power ups to their maximum potential, and take on plenty of big, threatening bosses that will give you a pretty rough time if you are not a god at dodging and firing back. A lot of this is what you would expect not just from Raiden, but from any other shmup of this era, although to its credit, it still manages to be fun enough for what we get here, and there are one or two new additions that do make things a little more interesting.

In terms of the main gameplay mechanics, nothing is changed: you are still flying along, shooting people down, and trying not to die, but what you shoot down people with has been improved upon in this installment. Most of the weapons and missiles that you get, along with the power ups that can upgrade them, are the exact same, with the exception of a brand new weapon known as the Bend Plasma. At first, when you get it, it doesn’t seem like much, just another regular shot weapon for your ship, but then when you fully upgrade it, it basically takes the form of a Proton Pack, with it being a laser that automatically homes in on whatever enemy is near, which makes it an instant favorite of mine. I love me some all-powerful lasers, and having one that can also home in on people is oh so sweet to get your hands on.

Right alongside this is a new type of bomb known as the Cluster Bomb, which is basically just one bomb containing a bunch of smaller bombs, which are deployed upon use and will consecutively blow up whatever is around you. I don’t think I prefer this one over the regular bomb, as it just does a lot more damage, but this one does cover a much wider range, so it could be useful for taking out any smaller enemies that are surrounding you at all sides, which is nice. And finally, for one last tiny change that was made to the game: the checkpoint system is gone, with it working much more like a regular arcade game whenever you die, and thank god for that too. Makes things a lot less stressful.

With that being said though, it doesn’t eliminate all stress completely. Just like with the original game, arcade syndrome is in full force, as you will be dealing with plenty of things at once shooting at you from all directions, and you need to be a shmup master in order to get through a lot of it. I don’t think I would say this is as hard as something like Truxton II, but it can still get pretty damn difficult. Aside from that though, there isn’t really much else I can say about this game. It is essentially just a slightly better Raiden, which is great to see, especially since it has its own set of stages, bosses, and different power ups to try out, but if you weren’t captivated by what the original Raiden gave you, then this game most likely won’t change your mind on that.

Overall, despite a major lack of change and how it is still incredibly difficult, Raiden II is a step in the right direction from the original game, and just a good game in general, taking everything that worked from the original game, improving on it with some changes and new additions, and just making for a really solid time that any shmup fan could get behind. I would recommend it for those who were fans of the original Raiden, as well as for all those shmup fanatics out there, because while this is far from one of the best ones out there, it still manages to provide the explosive and challenging fun that many would look for from one of these games, and that’s all that matters. But before we go though, I do wanna briefly go over the slightly updated version of this game that was released just a year after this game, Raiden DX. Not much was changed with this version, except there are now a couple of new modes to try out that do change up how the game plays, which is cool, but it doesn’t really alter anything too much to where I would say you need to jump on it if you loved the original so much. And… that’s about it. I would go ahead and ask that the next game in this series tones down the difficulty like I did last time, but seeing as this game didn’t do that, I can only assume it will keep going up from here, and I will be dead by the time I reach Raiden V.

Game #537

Funny story about Demon Front:

I've searched far and wide for this game's name for years. There was a place in my hometown named "Mundo Pequeño" for children's parties that had a single arcade game beneath the play area. I remember being about 5 years old and stumbling upon it. For the next five years, every single time a friend of mine had a party there, I immediately rushed to the Demon Front arcade to play it. It was one of the most magical experiences I've ever had.

When a kid came to play with me, we banded together to beat level after level up until the very final boss. I beat the game so many times, and I still wanted to play it again every time I came to "Mundo Pequeño". After years of playing it, when I was around 10-11 years old, a tragedy happened.

The machine started failing for some reason. Maybe rainwater got to it, or the years and elements just started to affect it. But the colors changed and became all red. Also, a periodic glitch made the game crash and erase all your progress. Still, I wanted to keep playing Demon Front. I still enjoyed it, but it felt sad to see the arcade machine suffer (apparently) permanent damage.

About a year later, the machine was gone. I guess it finally broke down. It was sad to see something that brought me so much joy disappear, and by then I had kind of outgrown children's parties. I spent a few more times in that place, without the game that I spent countless hours playing. And years later, it faded into an obscure memory.

Now, I finally remembered this game. I saw a couple of gameplay videos on YouTube and the nostalgic memories came right back. Apparently, it is a very rare Taiwanese title that was only released on specific arcade game boxes. In a way, it is kind of a miracle that I was able to experience it, but I feel so happy to at least remember it once again.

Strikers 1945 was (and kinda still is) my go-to "this arcade is cool if they have this game" game when I was in high school.

I didn't have too much experience playing shmups thanks to my parents never letting me play the cool "blow up a bunch of dudes in a plane while flashy stuff happens on the screen" games when we went to bowling alleys. They let me play the occasional beat-em-up when I got a chance, but for some reason or another shmups were always verboten when I was little. By the time I got a little older and was given more autonomy, arcades in the US were very obviously dying out, but I would still find the occasional game cabinet in movie theaters and pizza places. My local movie theater specifically had Strikers 1945 and I would go out of my way to play it a decent number of times before or after seeing a movie. I was never any good at it, but dodging projectiles for a few minutes and seeing the flashy bullet effects and explosions always gave me enough of a dopamine bump to give it another try whenever I found another cabinet of it somewhere. It was my go-to shmup.

Now that I'm much older and have played way more video games, I think it's safe to say that Strikers 1945 is best left in my nostalgia.

The gist of giant ships and planes transforming into machine gun-wielding mechs is cool as hell, but almost every other aspect of the game is either weak or forgettable.

The sound design across the board is just flat-out bad.

It's still fun, and it will always hold a special place in my heart as the first bullet-hell/shmup I actively remembered the name of, but after playing it comfortably in my living room via emulator with infinite coins instead of in a noisy, cramped, dimly-lit corner of a movie theater, I think it's safe to say that Strikers 1945 is just alright.

Don't ever ask me to 1cc a shmup by the way.

Never ask me that.

I just did not realize there was an FDS version of this game due to the version label for this page being wrong as of writing this so I’m sorry folks, you’re getting a Game Gear review from me.

This one I was expecting to be pretty middling but this was a fun game with a massive flaw. You go through seven stages destroying any enemy in your way with bosses at the end. The gimmick here is any enemy that goes past you and touches the bottom of the screen does damage to the Earth. If it hits 100% then you get an instant game over regardless of your lives counter. This mechanic isn’t too hard to manage but I find the enemy placement by stage 6 gets a bit cheap and lame. There’s also some powerups you can get like the explosive pod which can shoot with you but can be used as a bomb.

You got a fun shmup with a neat concept that isn’t even too challenging so what’s the problem? It has the worst controls I’ve seen in a shmup. So get this, if you at any point go diagonally, you have to let go of the d-pad to start moving in a cardinal direction. Meaning if you hold up right, you can’t go just right till you let go as you’ll continue to go up right. I don’t get this and I even checked the FDS original and this wasn’t the case there. If you’re like me and have played a lot of these, this will screw with you the entire time. It’s a good thing the game isn’t too hard or I’d be furious but this alone sours my opinion on the game a little bit.

The difficulty like I said isn’t hard but the bosses are pretty easy too which is surprising, even the final one isn’t too bad. At least the aesthetic of the game will keep the game from being stale and even the music is pretty nice though to be fair, this is not an original GG game so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I hate having to be so critical because I really wanna say it’s good but those controls are my number 1 issue. Someday I’ll play the FDS version and will probably leave a comment if I think it’s better or not. Maybe someone else could do it for me but I’m very doubtful that’ll happen. It’s still one of the better shmups on the handheld despite the issues. Still you’re probably better off playing one of the Aleste games.

A friend of mine through circumstance ended up being gifted a box of old gaming bits including some Megadrive controllers and a broken Sega Master System. With a bit of research online he managed to repair it fixing the cracked motherboard to get the TV picture back. This led him onto then being asked to repair a neighbours Gamegear. After tinkering with that and becoming interested he then ended up buying a broken one for pennies from an online seller to repair for his own use. He's very handy like that.

Why am I telling you this? Because before Christmas I went to stay with him for a week and for the first time in my life, play a Gamegear. First I tried the original Gamegear he repaired for his neighbour with the original backlit screen. Playing Sonic on it I was pretty unimpressed to be honest. The poor lighting made seeing details or enemies difficult and the small screen coming from playing my Steamdeck made going back to it hard. Playing his own Gamegear though where he had modified it adding a modern LCD screen was literally like night and day. I could see the light, literally. Playing the same Sonic game I could see the detail, colours and animations. Sonic actually seemed...pretty good? This led me to take an invested interest in what actually is available on the Gamegear. Something I'd never so much as glanced at, which has led me to try GG Aleste.

Initially I thought GG Aleste was just a Gamegear port of the original Aleste from the MSX but upon starting realised I was quite quickly wrong. You play as the daughter of the original protagonist from the MSX game in an alternative timeline, Ellinor Waizen. There isn't much other story to be had here except the opening scene if you leave the title screen running of her taking off in the Galvanic Gunner fighter craft, and an end scene upon beating the game.

The game plays over 7 vertical scrolling stages or rounds as the game calls them which mostly end in boss fights. Most of the enemies are pretty much the same for every stage without too much variation. Some of the boss designs are pretty decent though with the final couple being especially cool like a mixture of H.R Giger and Cyberpunk fused. In between these there are a couple of bonus stages to collect power ups and boost your score. Killing every enemy will give you a huge bonus point score but as you can only see your score between levels rather than during it, it comes together as earning points feeling pointless? (ba dum tss)

Speaking of power ups, the Galvanic Gunner Fighter has two ways of increasing how it attacks. Firstly is just power chips that drop from certain enemies increasing your base attack power, there are also 8 different weapon types that can be collected like homing, wide shot, laser etc. These level as you collect multiples of them for more shots, spread or damage. There is no bomb, special or charge shot though you do explode when you die. Dying is actually fairly un-punishing letting you keep your current weapon type just dropping the power level as consequence for your play error.

And that's pretty much all there is to it, the game doesn't have any extras or much to encourage re-playability. What you get here in totality is an extremely simple shoot 'em up but it isn't bad. It's pretty easy without flourishes but it is running on a Gamegear and except for a couple of moments of slowdown is a pretty fast paced game for an 8 bit system. It has some varied level locations, ok music and stunning front cover art. If you're interested in games of yesteryear or gaming history you can do far worse then play this little title.

+ Simple, easy and short.
+ Looks and runs pretty well.
+ Cover art is gorgeous.

- Kind of forgettable experience overall.
- Lack of enemy variety or reasons to replay.

I’m not gonna lie to y’all, I wasn’t looking forward to playing this game at all. I didn’t necessarily think it was gonna be terrible, certainly not as bad as the last Shinobi game that I played, but after The Cyber Shinobi left just an awful taste in my mouth, I was extremely put off from this series for a while. However, giving up on the entire series just because of one rotten entry wouldn’t be fair, so I figured I would go ahead and venture forward in this series to see if Shinobi can get its groove back, one way or another. So far in this series, we have had several arcade titles and plenty of console titles, but we haven’t had any instances where the series would tackle a handheld game. Kind of surprising, considering how many other franchises jumped on this bandwagon as soon as they could, but I guess Shinobi wanted to take its time in that regard. But, eventually, it would join the crowd with the release of the first handheld Shinobi game, The G.G. Shinobi.

When going into this game, I didn’t really have any high expectations whatsoever. I figured it would just be yet another Shinobi game, but it just so happened to be released on the Game Gear, and that was the only change. So, after playing it, I can definitely say that I was… half-way right. It is, more or less just another Shinobi game, and it was now on the Game Gear, but they do change some things up this time around, but not enough to where I would ever go back to this. So, with that in mind, I would simply say that this game is just ok, as it doesn’t do anything really anything that wrong, but there is really no reason to seek this game out if you were curious about it.

The story is, what a shocker, evil has taken over the land of Ninja Valley, and a bunch of other ninjas from your clan are captured, so it is up to you to go and save them, so it is a pretty standard Shinobi plot all around, nothing to really latch onto or get that mad at, the graphics are pretty good for the Game Gear, and it does resemble a Shinobi game, which is a lot better then I can say for other titles on the system, the music is alright, consisting of a lot of the typical tracks that you would hear not just from a Shinobi game, but one that was made on the Game Gear, the control is mostly what you would expect from one of these games, and it is kind of stiff, but nothing that you can’t get a grasp of, and the gameplay is mostly run-of-the-mill for this series, but there are one or two new additions to the formula this time around.

The game is still an average action 2D platformer, where you take control of one of five ninjas, take on a bunch of stages that are themed on what you would usually see from this game, take out a bunch of enemies using either regular attacks or super attacks that you can find lying around, gather plenty of health, extra lives, and super attacks from item boxes scattered throughout each stage to help you out along your journey, and take on a set of simple bosses, ones that will give you a hard time once you first encounter them, but once you figure out their patterns, they go down pretty easily. It is, more or less, everything that you would expect from a typical Shinobi game, but to give it some credit, it does have several unique element that no other game in the series has had until now. That at least helps out with the monotony.

First of all, similarly to Mega Man, in the beginning, you are given the choice of taking on the stage in whatever order you want, which not only gives the game some kind of replayability, but is also a nice change from previous Shinobi games, where you were always going in a set order for all of the stages. The second, and undeniably biggest change to this game, would be with the other ninjas. At the end of each of the main four stages, you will rescue one of your ninja brothers, who’s only difference compared to you is that they are a different color, so this game is essentially just Mighty Morphin’ Power Ninjas. But, what does make them stick out is that each of them has a unique weapon that they can use to take on enemies and tackle stages, such as with the pink ninja throwing bombs, and the blue ninja having this chain whip he throws out at enemies. Not only that, but each one of them also has their own unique special moves, which not only help out in taking out enemies and bosses, but can also help you out in traversing several levels that are otherwise impossible without them, so that is cool that the special moves are now more useful than just being a last resort.

Unfortunately though, none of that can save the game from, again, being your typical Shinobi game. Everything that you would expect from one of these games is present here, ranging from the enemies, the locations, and even with the boss designs, and while this may satisfy the most die-hard Shinobi fans, I was already starting to get sick of this formula that wasn’t getting any major changes to keep the game fresh. The addition of other ninjas to play as is nice, but you are gonna have to do a little better than that to make me like this series again. Not to mention, the final stage SUCKS. It is essentially a giant maze stage, where you go through plenty of these rooms with different deadly traps, which not only are extremely frustrating to navigate half the time, but you also have to redo multiple times if you go down the wrong fact. This is also paired with having to refight pretty much all of the previous bosses depending on which direction you take, and as you can imagine, it is not a fun time at all. It is a unique approach to a final level for a Shinobi game, but one that I am not welcoming in the slightest.

Overall, despite not doing too much wrong overall, and having some appreciated changes, this is basically just “the handheld Shinobi” and nothing more, being exactly what you would expect in both the best and worst ways possible. I would definitely recommend it for those who are big fans of Shinobi, as well as those looking for more quality games to play on the Game Gear, but for everyone else, there really is no reason to seek this title out whatsoever. It did end up getting a direct sequel, so hopefully that entry changes things up, but honestly, I don’t really have too many high hopes. Also, The G.G. Shinobi is just a stupid name, anyway. I guess they wanted to distinguish this from the other titles somehow, but they could’ve given it a cool subtitle like “Shinobi Warriors” or something like that, but no, we get The G.G. Shinobi instead. 10/10.

Game #380