And so, we come to Star Luster, a 1985 release for the Famicom that never came West. Part of the reason for this is the Evercade’s initial focus on retro home consoles, whereas Namco’s own Namco Museum releases have historically tended to focus on the arcade side of things. The publishing partners who have signed up to distribute their games on the platform are seemingly more than happy to jump on board with this philosophy too - and this is especially evident with the two Namco Museum Collection cartridges, which not only provide the classics we expect to always see on such compilations like Pac-Man and Dig-Dug, but also some lesser-known titles, some of which never officially left Japan on their original platforms. One of the great things about the Evercade retro gaming handheld is its unofficial mission to bring a variety of overlooked, underappreciated or unlocalised retro gaming titles to a worldwide audience. Which is why Rigid Force Redux, a recent Nintendo Switch and Xbox One release from German developer com8com1 Software, was such a pleasure to explore.Ĭontinue reading Rigid Force Redux: An R-Type By Any Other Name → Chorus Worldwide com8com1 gameplay HeadUp Nintendo Switch R-Type Rigid Force Alpha Rigid Force Redux video games This is an oversimplification, of course, but the fact remains that we see fewer shooters in the style of those from the late 16-bit and early 32-bit eras than we used to. And today, many - though not all - shooters focus on the elaborate choreography of the “bullet hell” or danmaku subgenre. The rise of polygons brought with it a shift to “2.5D”, where 3D graphics were combined with 2D gameplay for added spectacle. Then we moved into the beginning of the horizontally and vertically scrolling age, the former of which in particular flourished throughout the 16-bit home console age. And, as with everything else in this world, it displays distinct fashions and trends as the years go by.īack in the early days of gaming, the fixed shooter was king. The mechanical genre that we refer to as “shoot ’em up” actually covers a number of different gameplay styles. So let’s take a closer look!Ĭontinue reading Dragon Spirit: The New Legend – In Case of Emergency, Use Dragon → Dragon Spirit Dragon Spirit: The New Legend Famicom Namco Namcot NES retro games shmup shoot 'em up STG video games And this 8-bit home console version can now be enjoyed by a whole new audience today, thanks to its inclusion on the Namco Museum Collection 2 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system. And then they remembered it was still a very good idea a couple of years later when they released quasi-sequel Dragon Spirit: The New Legend for Famicom in 1989, with a North American NES version following in 1990.
Namco evidently felt this way back in 1987 when they released the fantasy-themed vertically scrolling shoot ’em up Dragon Spirit to the arcades. And as such there’s no good reason why we couldn’t have just as satisfying a time blasting our way through a fantasy tale as we could if we were behind the controls of some sort of comically overpowered spaceship. It makes sense - a sci-fi tale allows for pretty much unbridled creativity, taking the player on a journey through the stars into the great unknown, battling off hordes of unimaginable horrors from many light years away.īut the fantasy genre is ripe for exploiting in this way, too much like the more outlandish side of sci-fi, a lot of fantasy has never seemed too concerned with respecting the usual laws of physics, time and space. The shoot ’em up genre is, it’s fair to say, fairly dominated by spaceships.
The version we’re primarily concerned with today is the Famicom version from 1984, which you can now enjoy worldwide as part of the Namco Museum Collection 1cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system.Ĭontinue reading Galaxian: The Thinking Man’s Fixed Shooter → Evercade Evercade 02: Namco Museum Collection 1 Famicom fixed shooter Galaxian Namco retro games shoot 'em up STG video games Not sure about that? Look back on Namco’s Galaxian, originally released to arcades in 1979 and ported to a wide variety of platforms over the following years. And, moreover, they haven’t been for a long time. These days, of course, the more discerning gamers among us will, of course, be able to recognise that 1) there are a wide variety of different types of shoot ’em up out there, many of which are intricately designed works of mechanical artistry, and 2) they’re absolutely not as mindless as some people might like to make them out to be. For quite some time - particularly during the crossover from the 8-bit to 16-bit home computer and console eras - shoot ’em ups were regarded as the “dumb” side of gaming critics often thought we could “do better”.
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