Does the exact time embed no longer work? Anyway it’s right at the top of the whole thing.
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Super Star Soldier
I do not like shooters where getting hit powers you down. It creates a panic in my body. Knowing that one day I will be feeble and die. SSS throws powers and enemies at a relentless speed.
Luckily this is a Caravan game so the 2 Minute Mode is great. Love popping in for a little bit of that.
Current high score is 230200.
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Don’t come a bonkin’
The boss of this stage is tough! But I knew I’d have to beat it if I wanted to beat Rudie.
The game as a whole functions as a sequel to Blazing Lazers. Anyone who thought Blazing Lazers was too easy should give this one a try. The difficulty hits in the very first stage and after that, it’s a pretty brutal onslaught of popcorn enemies from all sides. That means there’s more of a Gradius effect here. I was really having a tough time making any progress once the game set me back to a checkpoint. Still, it’s very cool and it feels really good when I’m weaving through dozens of bullets for 30 seconds straight.
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And to round things out, I also played two other shooters.
Veigues: Tactical Gladiators
This one is very unconventional, probably the most like Atomic Robo-Kid. I’m controlling a pretty large robot and I have three weapons. Pressing down doesn’t make me crouch like I think it would. Instead, it makes me pivot so I can shoot behind me. I have a regenerating shield instead of a life bar. If it goes down all the way, each new hit will take out a piece of my robot. First the head, then the arms, then I die. In between each stage, I can choose to spend points on a number of upgrades. It really does feel tactical, with a lot of the game revolving around how to read the scanner and choose the best weapon for each wave. I liked it more than I should.
W Ring: The Double Rings
This really radiates Euro-SHMUP energy. Look at the font they use for the score! But the team is Japanese and they would go on to make Coryoon and Air Zonk. They are not at that level yet. This game has so many visible seams. Power ups are plentiful but they cycle really quickly through five options. Some of these options feel completely worthless and I screwed myself up a couple of times by picking up the ring at the wrong time. The second stage, the Geiger-esque one, is a real highlight but it’s mostly pretty boring!
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What you didn’t like that water stage in W Rings? I had a fantastic time with that one and want to go back because it is supposed to be an easy clear.
I didnt hate W Ring, but it doesn’t interest me much next to Aero Blasters, Darius, and Super Star Soldier.
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I think this got the cover of the first issue of the Flynt-published Video Games and Computer Entertainment that I picked up. It always made that game seem like a huge deal. That whole magazine was pretty into the TG-16. I wonder if there was some payola…
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Two volleyball games!
Super Volleyball
The profile perspective is odd but works. The ball smears and stretches when it’s spiked. It looks great. Volleyball has the rule where you only get a point if it’s on your serve. If you land it in during the other team’s serve, it just changes sides. That means the match lasts so, so long. I don’t like it!
If you look closely at the screenshot, you can see a reference to another Video System game, which has yet to be mentioned in this thread. Is it better than this? You’ll have to wait and see!
Sonic Spike
This one is a bit more fun. It’s really hard to return spikes, but it feels good whenever it happens. I love the cartooning. As you can see, they perfectly capture the dejected sorrow that my characters feel.
If you look closely, you can see a reference to another IGS game. I think this is actually better than that one!
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No! Don’t ruin Andy Eddy for me!
Unlike his successor Chris Gore, he didn’t become a big sell out. I’m still amazed that whatever is calling itself Film Threat now was too busy posting stories about Marvel movies to run an obit for Nick Zedd when he actually died.
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turbo technologies don’t seem like an orgamisation with the resources for that kind of business tbh
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I’m flipping through PC Engine Fan and I see something that says Momotarou Densetsu II has a 17 person party. I wonder how much I would enjoy it if it was translated.
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Final Zone 2
Uninteresting fact Shmup Junkie does not list the run-and-guns in his shooters video. That means no Bloody Wolf, no Last Alert, and no Kikikaikai. Even this which is linear and has full on autoscroll helicopter levels is not on there.
I’ve been playing these games in Japanese which honestly has impressed myself. I am always impressing on myself. That means I have been missing out on the impressive English voice acting for the era. Wow they translated the title song for the English dub which I have on as I write this post.
You waited two paragraphs. I like this game. I am growing to like Commando style games. I had positive things to say about Last Alert. Things like “It’s better than Bloody Wolf.” Stuff that would get be banned on insert credit. Wow the english voice acting is impressively bad, unlike the Japanese acting, which was just bad. Charming!
I like the moment to moment of FZ2. You slowly move out and take out waves. There are two real big problems. First when you lose all your life it just fades out. Not even an explosion! That’s bullshit. The second is you have zero invincibility frames on damage so you can just walk down along with the bullet hitting you and lose half your life. This should train you to move forward at oncoming bullets instead but 30 years of video game tell differently.
The game is even easy if you could do this. I think you have infinite continues. You could and I might sit down and power through the whole game. The lack of feedback to your failures bumbs me out though.
Holy Crap Stage 4 has a vocal theme. This owns.
Urusei Yatsura
Unlike the other Adventure games I’ve played so far, or uh Digital Comics, I had a fantastic time with this. It’s a difficult way to watch a cartoon. I only knew the movie Beautiful Dreamers.
This is full voiced. Which is great because the Urusei voice actors are great. Hearing Lum say “dacha” is great every time.
Despite Ataru being an absolute creep, I had a fantastic time with it. Because he is always punished for his creepness and the women are trying to survive in a man’s world. Would need to go back to school to write the essay that explains why Urusei Yatsura gets away with the skeezing and City Hunter doesn’t.
It’s a well dialoged game. Each of these characters has a good established voice and you get to hang out with them. The ending made me all warm and fuzzy. It reminded me one of the best things you can do in life is make a girl happy. I thought about times in my life where I had made Lady Rude happy and how a moment like that could occur again.
The PC Engine can put some Sprites! And some Anime looking stuff! It looks better than anything outside of a VHS OVA of the time. It really succeeds at wow Cool Anime At Home, and I Can Play It. Once if switches to grainy FMV I like it less, or it’s possible I am more fond of Anime 1986-1994 than 1994-2000.
There I’ve played every shooter for the PC Engine of 1990. Including one that wasn’t a shooter at all (Hanii in the Sky) and one that turned out to kind of being a shooter (that mech game that starts with a V that Minty played). Come back at the end of the month for my pointless list! And the end of the year for my increasingly unweildly list of every PC Engine game I played for this thread!
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I played two shooters, including the one referenced in Super Volleyball!
Rabio Lepus Special
I like the Latin name. How many Japanese games spell out Latin in kana? I’d enjoy that Galaxy Oddity thread.
This game has a cool rainbow strobing effect on bullets and invincibility. If I fly near the floor, Lepus starts walking instead of flying. If I fly close to enemies, Lepus will punch them.
The game earns points with me for having a secondary fire that is not a smart bomb. Instead, six missiles shoot out from angles around Lepus. These missiles explode against walls, so you have to be careful on when you launch them. But! You can wear a bow and it powers up the missiles to go through walls. Powerups come in these rotating capsules. I assume if I time my shots right, I can get more valuable powerups, but I could never get it right.
Not bad!
Final Blaster
This is apparently the third Bosconian game. It’s sort of a love letter to other Namco shooters without being as good as any of them. I spotted references to Bosconian, Galaga, Xevious, and Libble Rabble.
This game has really severe Gradius-syndrome. I struggled with the first stage a lot until I had a run where I could collect a bunch of power-ups. With full power-ups, I was able to glide through the first two stages. Then I died at the boss of the third stage. It wasn’t even that hard, but without a powered-up weapon, it was taking so long to damage the boss. I got impatient and took bigger risks. After that, I could never pick up enough power-ups to survive up to the boss again.
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first of all, because final zone 2 got mentioned:
also, i found a bunch of issues of gekkan pc engine uploaded to the archive. april 1990 isn’t available, so i looked at last month’s issue.
yes, i am a game freak for the pc-engine
first, they took a look at that year’s ces. while they were willing to give some space to the enemy, they did also do a fantastic job of making nintendo look like a bunch of fuckin losers, showing off the u-force and reminding people about tengen’s unlicensed games.
then a pretty in-depth look at a lot of upcoming games. i’ll just post some of the more notable ones, and only the first couple pages (some of these go about six pages long, with strategies for each level)
image fight
super dodgeball, with really bad gamepro-style art on the sides
the new zealand story
GENPEI TOUMADEN
there’s other in-depth looks, like splatterhouse, atomic robo-kid, super volleyball, showing off every route in super darius, and technical specs on the turbo express.
some sort of small comic, featuring a postage stamp with the flaming carrot on it
there’s a lot of maps for several different rpgs in here, for those of us who got stuck and finally had to cave in and ask for help. there’s charts on here too, which i’m assuming are things like elemental weaknesses? there are codes for other games included too. you know, normal stuff.
this looks like the cover to a porno, but it’s just an interview segment with a pop idol i’ve never heard of, because it’s 1990. she’s playing the new zealand story.
holy shit, this might be the most high-res look at rusher kimura’s gig marks you’ll ever see.
it kind of goes on like that for the rest of the issue. there are a lot of ads for games in here that look really nice. there’s a language barrier here, so for all i know, they were just as obnoxious as the american ones at the time. maybe cd laser soft was threatening you with the shame of being known as a lame homosexual if you didn’t play red alert or whatever.
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City Hunter
This is based off an anime/manga which might lure you in with it’s cool dude and even cooler music (in the anime). Unforunately the main thing that happens in this show is the Main Character is a lecherous pig. They even made a “modern” one in like 2019 which I saw in a theater and felt pretty uncomfortable by the third time he gropes a woman in the first 10 minutes.
Which is to say this is an open stage rolling thunder like. You enter doors until you find someone that has a key then you enter more doors till you fight a boring boss and eventually your stumbling around causes the credits to roll and you find out Sunsoft made this game. It has chiptunes rendering of some songs from the anime and sometimes a naked girl behind the doors.
This game had what I expected from anime stills and frames in a 16bit video game. Which is to say vastly lower quality than we’ve seen across dozens of games. The “select mission” screen has a very cute graphic of Kaori that I hope someone makes into a gif and emoji we can use.
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this post reminds me that the other day i remembered that the first time i saw a representation of sexual harassment as a child was in Demon City Shinjuku
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I like how two-thirds of the magazine ads posted were from Telenet
praise be to Mr. Akashino, may he still be on the run from the yakuza
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destiny’s Colin
and Colin again
completed Ys Book I, charming string of little moments, pretty breezy up to Darm Tower, lots of backtracking there til I figured out what I was doing, most of the bosses throughout gave me grief though especially this one which seemed next to impossible at first
then I realised maybe I should grind a bit so I walked up and down the same corridor outside the boss door achieving a perfect rhythm where a 
would appear at one end, get murder bumped, I’d walk to the other end where another would spawn, kill them, turn back and so on for about 3 minutes, think I gained 4 levels and it made a ridiculous difference in the amount of damage I dealt and received maybe I should have been doing more of that all along!
on to Ys Book II
I will kill all the 
also it goes without saying the music rules, made the final dungeon wandering bearable just waiting for that freak howl of a guitar solo to kick in
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Shanghai II
Bold of them to put this on a disc. I like how there are different arrangements to choose from, but I hate looking at the tiles. They have exactly the wrong amount of fuzziness.
Klax
When I heard about making an X in Klax, I got really excited to try it. Turns out, doing it is really hard! You have to risk filling up the entire board to do it. It’s so visually cluttered that I wound up putting the wrong tile down so many times. I hate how you have to catch the tiles before letting them drop. I didn’t know the plural of Klax was Klaxs.
Ryuukyuu
FACE is here with a very FACE puzzle game. It’s a falling block puzzler where the blocks don’t fall until you tell them to. Which is good because the game requires really complicated computation to make smart choices. You lay poker cards down in a five by five grid. The rows, columns, and diagonals all add up to different poker hands and the game is about making the most valuable grid possible. If you meet a score threshold, the game gradually shows you a picture of a pinup lady. It has some nice Okinawan chiptunes. This is my favorite game out of the three.
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