Retronauts - 693: Capcom's Vertical Shooter Legacy

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Kevin Bunch, and Brian Clark take a moment to reflect on the history of Capcom, beginning with the genre that got them started in the first place: shooting games where a little guy moves up the screen and blasts everything in sight. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, give a hoot, shoot! Everyone, welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and I am here. here at Midwest Gaming Classic, not actually at the event itself, but at the hotel adjacent to the event, where once again, we are indulging in the grand tradition of recording a podcast in a hotel room. And it's a very empty hotel room. They just renovated this place and they still have them put in all the furniture. So if it sounds more echoey than usual, I swear to God, it's not my fault. But we're going to do our best here on episode, what is?

693. And when I say we, I am referring to a loop master Kevin Bunch. Wow, how do you master loops? Very carefully. Does that just mean you can tie your shoe or what? Well, first you have to push a button and then it does the rest of the work by itself. Oh, wow. That's true mastery. I don't even have to, you know, pull back on a joystick or anything. Phenomenal. And also, it's Brian Clark from one million power. And whenever I'm in trouble, I also just kind of do these loops in the air and I'm completely invincible while I'm doing them. It's actually pretty convenient.

That's fantastic. I have no funny things to say, but like Capcom, I do hate bees. No, actually, that's not true. I hate some bees. Bumble bees, carpenter bees. They're fun. They're harmless. The other guys, though, kind of...

Wasps, no good. Wasps, no good. Although, they'll leave you alone if you don't bother them. That's true. It's the nasty little bees that are just like a bullet-shaped bee that are very aggressive and will get in your face and try to like eat your food. Yeah, I don't like those guys. They really piss me off.

One of them stung me when I was a kid, so I'm, I still have like, get kind of triggered by them, even though it's been 40-something years. Anyway, so we'll talk about bees and other such things, but we are talking this week about Capcom, and specifically Capcom's top-down shooters. So we've done a few series through the years where we look at the catalogs of different companies. We've talked about Taito, Namco, I feel like Konami. And, you know, what we've done with those is just take them in a chronological sequence

and try to cover everything. And I feel like that's kind of scattershot. And, you know, like you can just go read Wikipedia if you want to see that. I'm more interested with this series about Capcom. I don't know how many episodes it's going to be, but what I want to do is just kind of break their catalog down by genre and game type and kind of the concepts that emerge from these games. And I'm hoping that by taking it in this more kind of structured, focused approach,

what you're going to get is a clearer picture of how Capcom's games evolved. I make no promises. This is experimental. But it seems like a pretty smart idea. So I invite you to take the ride with us. We're going to take you for a ride, although that's a different Capcom genre. We'll get there someday. So, gentlemen, what is your first memory of a Capcom shooter, if I may ask? Oh, boy. That's a good question. How about you go first while I think about this? I think mine was probably 1942 in an arcade at some point. point, which is not really shocking because, as I'm sure we'll probably all end up agreeing on, like, 1942 is sort of where they solidified their formula a little bit. I have some memory of playing it, and I don't recall if it was a 7-Eleven.

It was definitely not in arcade. It was, you know, from the era where arcade cabinets were just anywhere and everywhere. It could have been a laundromat. Yeah, video games were like dandelions. They just sprang up anywhere. But it was definitely at a point where I was. too young to really grasp what I was supposed to be doing to play a shooting

game effectively, so I think I probably played it for about five minutes and went, huh. But yeah. I mean, if you can survive for five minutes in 1942, not knowing what you're doing, that's impressive. I can't be critical. So now that I've had a little bit

of thinking time, I remember that the first one I ever played was 19XX. At an arcade, I'm actually wearing a shirt for that arcade. longer exists. They had a handful of shooters in their sort of back room area. It was a very small arcade. And that was one of them. I remember, like, oh, that sounds interesting. I wonder what this is deal. Like, I've heard of 1942. I knew it existed. I just haven't really messed with it.

I can't believe they made a license game based on that Spielberg movie. But yeah, I was a big fan of that one. I remember sinking quite a few quarters into it until they finally swapped it out with, I don't know, what, what game they swapped it out for at this point, something silly, no doubt. We went right into modern Capcom, shoot. Yeah, I sure did. And, you know, this was the same time I was buying NES games because they were dirt cheap, so eventually I'd get 42 and 43 and a few others.

I'm sorry if you had to play that on the NES first. Yeah, it wasn't a great time. Yeah, I've got to say that going from, you said, 1940XX, or 19XX, or 19XX. Yeah, going from 19XX to 1942 on NES is a come down, for sure. Just a little bit. Yeah, my first memory was definitely 1942. I remember seeing it at a bar and restaurant called the Copper Caboose.

There were a couple of them around Lubbock, Texas. And I saw that, and it was on a school trip. So it wasn't really that much of a bar. It was more like a family. restaurant that had a bar in it, but they had a big, like, pinball and, you know, pool and arcade section. So it was like a, you know, end of semester or whatever, elementary school lunch trip, I think. And so, of course, I gravitated over to the video games. And I just remember seeing it and thinking it looked kind of neat, but I didn't have any money

with me, so I didn't play it. And then a couple of years later, uh, the pizza joint we would go to like every other Sunday after church got in 1943. At 1943, and I said, oh, this is so good. I love this so much. So it kind of submitted itself as a game that I loved. But that is not where Capcom got started. They actually got started with a game that you would look at now and think, wow, this does not seem like the seeds of greatness.

It was called vulgous. Even the name lacks greatness. guys played this one? Yeah. Not very much, but I did refresh myself before this. If I remember, this is Capcom's first game. Period. That's why we're starting with the shooter, the vertical shooters specifically.

I guess I forgot to mention that. This episode, I mean, you can see it in the title, but it is on Capcom's vertical shooter legacy. They've had a few other kinds of shooters, and my initial intent was to get to those this episode. We're not going to. There's just no way we're going to touch on all of them. So we're just focusing on the vertical ones because that is where they started.

They started here with Bulgus in 1984. Yeah, it's an interesting game. So clearly it's inspired by Zevius, as almost everything was in Japan at the time. And I like some of the ideas in it. So it doesn't have the bomb from Zevius, because there's not really ground targets per se. Everything's just sort of flying around. But you have a limited stock of missiles that you can fire off, and they do a lot of damage. and they're also penetrative.

So if there's like a row of little popcorn enemies, I guess you'd call them, that will fly right through them all. The missile doesn't have much horizontal coverage, so you really have to rely on either, like, lining up groups or just use it on the larger ships, which is kind of what I did. I mean, there's not really much point to using the missiles

on the popcorn enemies, as Kevin calls them, because you do have a limited number, And it's not like any one type of enemy is necessarily more dangerous than the others. So, yeah, I feel like the missiles are very specifically for taking down the giant robot insects that I show up, you know, every once in a while. Or else, you know, you do have the formations where it's just like a vertical line of enemies, a column of enemies, and you can pop it right through all of them and take them out. So I'm sure there's some sort of scoring bonus for that. But I can't say that I've taken the time to determine whether that's the case or not because it's just not an interesting game.

Kevin mentioned that it's very Zavis-like, but it does lack the sort of focused targeting the ground combat. So it's like so many shooters that were coming out in this period of video games in Japan, they said, oh, Zavis is very popular. We should do that. And then kind of failed to really engage with the ideas that made Devius good. So I think I read somewhere that they put this game out really hastily. They just wanted to kind of get this together to launch the business.

So that would probably explain why it's very unimaginative. It was just, you know, like basically a contractual obligation. Like, let's get something out there. Let's go. So, yeah, not great. I mean, it gets kind of fast and hectic later in the game when a lot of stuff starts flying at you. And it does have an element of lateral screen scrolling,

which you didn't see in a lot of shooters of this era. It wasn't the first time that it ever happened. But, you know, it does force you to kind of be mindful of the fact that there can be enemies. sort of flanking you, and you have to watch out for those, and the focus of the screen shifts as you fly around and evade. So, you know, it's okay. It's fine. I really think, like, the most important thing here is that it introduced the iconic Capcom pow icon, the, like, large P and then small caps OW. Yeah. The Yoshi, I think, is in it too, right?

Yeah, it's an enemy thing that comes back to you. I hope that debuted in, in exit-exes. I don't know if it was the exact same icon, but I do remember playing it the other day. They'll sort of show up, and then they'll sort of show up, and then they'll like home in on where you are, but not very

well. Okay, maybe this yes, Shichi did show up in Vulgis first. So that would be two things that Volgis does. Congratulations, Volgis. You did two things. Not much else. It's more than you deserve, probably.

So that came out in the summer of 1984 in Japan. And I don't know if Vulgis actually got an American release. I'm not sure. I don't believe it ever got a home port until, you know, like collections later on. I think it was on the PSP collection. Capcom classics reloaded or whatever it was called. I think it was on one of the console ones because I remember trying it out on, I think, the Xbox release of that collection. Okay.

So it was hanging around. Yeah, I mean, they eventually. dredged it up, but they don't go back that far into the past for a good reason. And that is because in December of 1984, they released, I would say, their first really meaningful game, which was 1942. And people love to say, wow, isn't it weird that you're playing a Japanese game about blowing up the Japan in World War II? Yeah, it's so hard. Okay, so we've got that out of the way. but it is an interesting theme in that

it's 1942 is very very diligent in its focus it is a game about aerial combat in World War II and it doesn't add in science fiction elements or fantasy elements I mean it's not realistic but it maintains its theme very very scrupulously and it's it's entirely an aerial shooter

kind of like vulgous, there's no ground element to it. But, you know, the wallpaper changes beneath you. Sometimes you're flying over the ocean, sometimes over islands. If you actually somehow have the patience to get through to the end, eventually you get to Okinawa and you're flying over cities. And that's kind of cool to see like a Japanese city from 1940, the 40s, you know, like very tiny boxes of houses represented in the distance. But it's pretty repetitive. and yet it's really pretty compelling. I think it's a, you know, it's a fun game, especially the arcade version,

more so than the NES version, which is just kind of sluggish and monotonous. But we'll talk about that in a moment. Yeah, this one did come out here. I know I've seen the machines around for the Round Star one. It was Round Star, right? Yeah, it was the, what was it, like, short boy or wide boy or something like that. Yeah, with like the nice little wood grain paneling on it.

It wasn't Fat Man and it wasn't little boy. That would be going too far. But, yeah, New Wave Toys did, you know, they have their replicate line, and they did a great repro of the 1942 arcade machine, which I don't have space for those and I'm getting rid of mine, but I kind of want to keep the 1942 one just because it's so distinctive. It is a shorter machine than the average. You kind of have to hunch over it a little bit in real life,

but it's got the wood grain side paneling. It just feels like this is what the 1980s were actually like. Like not Miami Vice Neon. It was this wood grain kind of a little dumpy, but also it felt like, you know, inside this dumpiness, here is a glimpse of the future. Through the past, actually, since it was World War II. But, you know, technology combined with this kind of aging mid-century look, it's nice. It has a very striking feel to it. And, you know, the theme for 1942, I think, is really interesting to see in video games at the time because, you know, now we're in an era where there's been so many World War II themed games, but there's more circumspect for quite a while there.

You know, there's a couple 70s machines that, like, Flying Fortress that are ostensibly World War II theme, but they never come out and say it. There's obviously electro-mechanical machines, you know, used that a lot. But you didn't see a lot out of video games, and you really didn't see it that much out of Japanese video games at the time. So I feel like, you know, on the computer side of things, American computer games, you saw a lot of games based on the European theater, which were either strategy games, like Into the Eagles Nest. Or no, Eastern Front, 1941. Or you had Into the Eagles Nest, which is like gauntlet. but in, you know, in World War II, a German bunker. I do feel that you, you know, the nature of the theater is differed.

It was much more land war, sea war in Europe and much more of aerial combat over the ocean and the Pacific theater. So you do tend to see more shooters kind of based around that theme, but a lot of those tended to be cockpit-based shooters. kind of like a first-person perspective. We were just looking at one, Taito one yesterday. Interceptor, that's right. And you had, oh, man, I just totally blanked out. You didn't see a lot of World War II games coming from Japan,

I think maybe for obvious reasons. And the ones you did see were like Taito's Flying Shark, is that what it's called, where you are actually playing as a zero pilot, like fighting your way through the American forces to the different occupied islands. So, yeah, I feel like it was a little, like, just kind of a weird thing for them to kind of contend with. And with 1942, Capcom is just like, yeah, we lost.

Let's just own up to it. And here you can play as this one American plane that wrecks our entire Navy. And my understanding is that there was some kind of. kind of like grumbling about this on the Japanese side of things. But clearly it wasn't so verboten that, you know, so transgressive that they had to shut it down because we got a ton of sequels to it. It was very popular. And it's also kind of not really important to enjoying the game either.

Like, sure, it's there if you really want to think about it and engage with it. But it's very easy to just be like, I am a plan. and I'm shooting other planes and doing loops. Yeah, you fly as an American Mustang, is that correct? It's a P38 Lightning, I remember. I get those two planes confused a lot.

So that's the one with the double booms, right? As opposed to a single... Yeah, it has like the two parts coming off for the tail. Yeah, okay. So it's a very distinctive looking plane. And most of the enemies you're fighting are like small Japanese zeros

which were known for being extremely fast, agile, but very fragile. You know, if you've seen Star Wars, you kind of, you kind of know, like, the X-Wing fighter is the lightning or the Mustang, and Thai fighters are basically zeros. They're extremely fragile, but extremely fast and deadly in that respect. So that's kind of the basic dynamic. But, you know, compared to Vulgus, the formations are much more. They're just better thought out. It does have this element of kind of randomness where, you know, individual planes will come in.

But there are a lot of formations. And actually that becomes sort of the key to powering up your plane because when you see formations of red enemy planes that, you know, they pop in every once in a while. If you can take all of them out, then you earn yourself a power up. And I think Konami would steal that later for Gradius, you know, wipe out an entire formation of and you get a capsule. So, you know, a little bit of pilfering and borrowing there. But the power-up system is pretty simple. Like your plane initially, you can fly around.

You can fire parallel bullets, which is kind of nice. You don't start with a single bullet. So you have a pretty wide field of fire compared to most shooters. And you have the ability to perform evasive loops by hitting the alternate button. There's no, like, bombs or anything. you know, instead of going the Zavius route, Zavius, oh my God, I mispronounced it, according to my own rubric.

According to, you know, instead of going the Zavius route and turning the alternate action button into a form of attack, here it's a form of defense. So you can loop out of the way of incoming enemy fighters

or planes and avoid taking a hit and avoid being damaged. So that's pretty great. But then you have the POW icons return and they allow you to, one, double the width of your firepower. Actually, it's more like tripling the width because you get four bullets, but it just makes your field of fire much, much wider. So you're hitting really hard and really wide. And then you can also get an alternate power up that causes two tiny little planes to go woo and kind of swirl in from off screen and link up with your planes.

Options before options. Yeah, pretty much. So these little guys fly next to you and increase your firepower even more. And also, they can take a hit for you. So if one of them gets struck by a plane or a bullet, then your main plane doesn't explode. It just takes out your flinker, which is kind of reminiscent of Gallagher. And I think gapless was out by this point too. So, you know, the idea of sort of increasing your firepower, but all

also increasing your hitbox and kind of that risk reward element. But here you don't have as much because you're not sacrificing anything to get the expansion. It's just a power up. And they're not that common. So you're always on the lookout for them. And, you know, grabbing the pow icon. That can be very risky sometimes. There's a lot of crossfire in here.

A lot of them will appear kind of more up on the screen and like going too far up onto that screen is risky. Because the other thing about the waves is that behind you is not safe. Vulgus had like, I don't think any enemies actually came from behind you in Volgis. They would do kind of little loops like back on you, but I don't think you ever had an enemy come off screen from behind. Here you absolutely have enemies coming off screen from behind. And there's very little warning when they do. Yes.

Which I know later shooters will get a little better about, but not so much here. Yeah, so in addition to the formations of tiny fighters, you also have to deal with a few sets of larger planes. And I guess those are meant to be like frigates and bombers. And then, you know, there's a couple of like boss class gigantic bombers that fill the screen. And all of these have different forms of behavior. So, you know, the standard fighters come in either kind of individually and shoot at you or they come in formations and shoot at you.

And they're usually coming from the front or the sides. But then the larger planes will come from. behind and they're kind of immovable objects like when it's coming up behind you you don't have a way to attack it until you get behind it as it moves up the screen so it forces you to be reactive and avoid them and it creates this kind of unsafe zone on the screen like you you you suddenly lose that block of space in which to evade enemies and kind of you know draw a beat on enemies so conventional wisdom I I don't know about conventional wisdom, but like, especially if you're young to shooters,

like I think a lot of people's initial instinct, whether it's a vertical horizontal, it's just hug the bottom or hug the left side. But like this game very quickly does something to tell you, no, don't do that. You should move yourself up more, but not too far up. So it's a good game to break you of that because there are certainly games where you can just do that and by and large be okay. Yeah, there is no real safe. space in

1942. You know, initially the larger planes will come in sort of from the side. The gunships

will come in toward the left or to the right. But after a while, you start getting multiples coming in at once and they'll, you know,

like three will come across and really force you kind of in a staggered pattern and really force you to move out of the way and really limit what you can do,

but you can't just like hang out of the middle of the bottom of the screen because you will, in fact, die. Luckily, though, it's not like R-type-2 levels of speed or something, though. Like, yeah, you have stuff coming from behind you, but they're relatively slow-moving ships.

So, like, as long as your reaction time is decent, you can probably save yourself. Yeah, I appreciate that sort of level of dynamism to you having to move around and everything. Because I feel for a 1984 game, you did not necessarily see that a lot in shooters. I mean, this was still an era where companies, we're getting away from the idea that you could only just move left or right along the bottom, like a space invaders type game. But now you can move up a little bit. And in this one, you can move everywhere, and you will probably have to, just to make it.

Yeah, and the bigger ships, they tend to behave a specific way, which is that they come in from off screen and rise up to the top of the screen, but then they don't just fly off. They stay there, and they start hitting you with their tail gun. so you know you can't just ignore it and wait for it to go away you eventually have to go after it and they take a lot of damage to blow up the bigger the plane the more more bullets they can take

so you need to yeah really respond to those and so this game is pretty repetitive it doesn't really do much except change the wallpaper and make the formations more aggressive and like I said there's you know a few stages where at the end there's a humongous plane.

That's kind of it. And it's sort of interesting because I've never reached the end of this game myself, but if you look at a long play online, there is a giant bomber at the next to last level. And then the final level is just more shooting.

And you get to Okinawa and you get a message that Japan has surrendered to you because you got to the end. So, you know, the fact that you're going to Okinawa, and it's not set in 1945, they kind of sidestep the actual way the Japanese surrender happened and how the war really ended, which is still a very sensitive topic there, understandably.

So, you know, despite the fact that they were basically making a game that said, hey, here's a chance to blow us up, you know, let's defeat the Japanese Navy. They were still kind of working within the bounds of good taste. So I think that's something that helped it go down a little more easily. But yeah, it's a very compelling game, even if it does get kind of boring. And it was ported to a lot of systems. The NES version is definitely the best known and best selling because it was really the first vertical shooter on the NES,

one of the very first third-party games for NES. And it was actually Capcom's first Famicom game, their first home game ever. I'm in Japan and 86 in the U.S. I think so it hit like that perfect time spot to where like there wasn't necessarily a ton of software. So it's like, I might as well get a copy of 90. Yeah, I mean, and on Famicom at the time, you did have, you know, the Namco shooters like Galaxia and Gallagia and of course, Zevius. And then there were a few games that really wanted to be Zevius, like Gamos and Zunos and God and Golg. Love that title.

The Scroll RPG that isn't. But I would say that 1942 is probably, you know, despite its flaws, the NES or Famicom port of 1942 was still probably the best vertical shooter that was not by Namco at that point. So even though it is a mess, thanks to developer Micronix, it's still, you know, like at the time it still stood out, I think. Yeah. and I will say though most people, and rightly so, most people's biggest complaint about that port is the audio, which is bad, but I will say that the audio in the arcade game wasn't very good either. It was still incredibly repetitive and just not, like, no one listens to the soundtrack to 1942 even in its original form.

Yeah, it's supposed to be, I've got it on vinyl, and it's not, it's not a delight. 1942 definitely feels like one of those games you want to play in an arcade environment where all you can hear are the other machines and just like a little bit of the beat I get the creative impetus there which was to create like a martial military theme with snare drums and you know whistles but it sure is shrill and annoying so not not the best creative choice but yeah the NES port really really just butchers the ear. It's terrible. But nevertheless, despite all of that, I believe this was the game design debut of Okamoto, the Yoshiki Okamoto, who would go on to

co-found platinum. Am I remembering that right? Or? No, I don't think he had anything to do with platinum. I mean, I know he eventually got into mobile games and made his fortune there but that was quite a yeah what was the game he made it big with I'm desperately trying to remember what the game was called and I just can't pull it

but it was especially in Japan it was like incredibly successful is it puzzle and dragons I think so yeah it might have been puzzle and dragon yes yes I think it was yeah so anyway this was kind of his debut title

and I think that you know cemented him as a celebrity superstar for the company and he had a lot of clout and could make a lot of stuff and usually it was really good so it worked out.

So the following year, you know, Capcom diversified its lineup pretty quickly with a lot of other games like Commando and so forth. But they continued to sort of till the fertile soil of the vertical shooter because that was still a huge deal in Japan especially. So the next game is called Exit X's, or Savage. bees in the U.S. And I kind of feel

like this one was their attempt to do a mulligan on Vulgus because fundamentally they're very similar but this is just much better. I mean, it's almost a sequel to Vulgis really because Vulgis, you know, is about shooting random guys and then giant robotic insects

come at you and here like the entire game is themed around bees. Like the backgrounds all have a a hexagonal honeycomb pattern to them and that's really kind of the defining element of the game.

That in bonus mode screens where giant fruit and skulls fly at you. You are a ship that eats fruits and vegetables which is interesting. Yeah, it's a little bit of a strange game but I think it kind of works because just like 1942 has this

through line of here is World War II naval combat, you know, aerial combat over the ocean. This has a through line of you are fighting through beehives in space and sometimes there are skulls. So, you know, that's fine,

I guess. It feels more like they're leaning into the Star Force concept than Zevius here. Because you do have, you do have, ground-based emplacements, but you're not attacking them with a second alternate weapon. It's just that basically the ground exists on two layers. There's like the distant ground and

you can't destroy anything down there and it's just kind of wallpaper the scrolls in the background. But then sometimes there'll be sort of up-close beehive spaces that scroll at a different rate and, you know, has that parallax and there will be emplacements on those and you're just kind of skimming those services. So you can't actually interact with them in the way that you could, like, Star Soldier, but I don't think that was out yet. So that, you know, it's a fair cop. I think that might have been the next year.

I think so. That sounds right. And the second one is actually a bomb this time. It doesn't, it's a bullet clearing bomb. It doesn't, like, destroy the enemies on screen. But, like, that alone just makes it quite the upgrade from Vulgas. It's interesting how long it took. for the bomb button to sort of function like it did in Defender.

Like Defender came out as screen-clearing Smart Bomb, and then no one really did anything with that for a while. But sort of rediscovering that concept over a series of games here. This one wasn't checkpoint-based either, unlike Volgis. You actually are continuing right on the spot, which I feel like people take for granted in arcade games after a certain point. If you go back to early 80s stuff, like you run into so many arcade games where it's like, no, you're either going back to a checkpoint or restarting the level. You just don't actually even have the ability to continue.

Like, that didn't necessarily happen with Vulgas, but there was a point where you just, no, your play's done back to the beginning. Yeah, so this one also came to Famicom 10 days after 1942 did, but it was ported by a different company, took Komishoten, and that was a whole lot of Capcom there at the end of 1985. Got to get in on that Famicom boom, before it busts. Yep, that's right. Got to get those out before the disk system arrives. Anyway, yeah, this is not that interesting a game, but I do feel like it's much stronger than Vulgous and feels like, you know,

there's kind of a point of view, and it's Capcom moving in the right direction and, you know, showing that 1942 wasn't just a fluke. Yeah. It's fascinating to me that, like, the concept of bees and shooters sort of took off from here. I'm wondering how many people who worked on this game wound up working on the Dodo and Pachi series at Cave eventually. Well, and, you know, before this, you had Gallagher. Yeah. Formations of insects.

Sometimes they turn into scorpions, but that is, yeah, that's just kind of a thing. Maybe just, you know, shooter fans in Japan just really hated bees. I mean, I've heard about those murder hornets that live in Japan, so I can understand why there would be this, like, visceral hatred and fear of stinging flying insects. They seem to be like a country with a greater appreciation for good or bad for insects than here, since there's that whole subculture about, like, beetle catching. Yeah. Beatles, stag beetles fight and things like that.

Yeah. So maybe that's, this is just sort of coming off of that as well. So their next shooter, it's kind of a weird one. I put an asterisk next to it because it's a vertical shooter sometimes, and then it's kind of not. I don't know how I feel about this one. I don't feel like it's very successful, but they were trying something, and I respect that. And, you know, this kind of crosses over with some of the other episodes that will be covering of, you know, for Capcom stuff. because when you're not in a vertical shooter mode,

the game feels kind of like a cross between Ghost and Goblins and Section Z. And, you know, those were kind of part of the horizontal shooter element of Capcom's history, although I think there may be some arguments about whether or not we should classify ghost and goblins as a shooter, but for the sake of discussion here, we're considering a horizontal

shooter. But yeah, so this is kind of mixing up formats. This was before Life Force on Famicom and, you know, that do, and I guess, you know, life, did Salamander in arcades? It's been a long time since I played Salamander. Salamander did do the

vertical and horizontal place. That was right around the same time as legendary wings in arcades. Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, I don't know exactly what came first. So I'm trying to think, are there other shooters from before this time that alternated top-down and side-scrolling.

Vanguard. As in case Vanguard has the alternate vertical and horizontal. So that's where it came from? I think so. Maybe, ish? Probably. Fair enough. I mean, Section Z also did. Kind of. You're always

in a side view. It's always like side-scrolling. It's just that sometimes it changes directions on you. That's fair. So, you know, it's kind of like rastin, but flying. What a description. But also, legendary wings is kind of like rastin but flying

because you're playing as like a beefy dude or you can be a lady. This is a cooperative game. So you can be either Ares, the god of war, or Michelle Hart. I don't think she's a mythological figure. but she does show up on a lot of other Capcom games through the years so... You know, I said Cairdly claimed Athena

so they're like, okay, uh, Michelle Hart. She could have been Diana. I mean, Diana even, you know, had a bow. True. But the thing is, it's kind of Greek mythology themed,

but also kind of not. It's taking place in like this sort of weird pseudo-ionic cyber fantasy world. That's very futuristic. And so the thing about this is that, yeah, there's like statues of gods and stuff that, you know, you have to fly around or blow up. And you have, you do have a Zevia-style bomb here, which has kind of a neat forward-arcing motion and will blow things up on the ground. You don't have the reticle for it, though, so you kind of have to guess where it's going to land.

But then you come across these gigantic robot stone faces. They're like a Golem sculpture that then has, you know, like a, like Commander Britae from Macross Cyber Eye thing going on. And these things suck you in. And then the game format changes to be these sort of walk and shoot spaces where you have to like move across parallel tracks and climb ladders. And then you get to the end of it and the ground flies or falls away and you return to being able to fly. and blow up a boss. It's kind of underbaked, and it just doesn't feel like they quite knew what they wanted to do with the dual format concept, but they wanted to do something with it, so they tried, and it's okay.

Yeah, I mean, the side-scrolling portions, like you kind of said, some of them are just you're moving your character the same way you do in a typical shooting game where you're not actually touching the ground, but others are just like, no, you're walking. like on your feet now, you're going up ladders and down ladders, and it's like, what happened? I don't know if anyone who, you know, put a coin into legendary wings for probably what it showed in the attract mode really wanted that part of it, per se. Yeah, it's a lot like Sonic Unleashed and where the parts where you're getting what you came for, you know, Sonic running around or flying around shooting things. Like, that's pretty good. And then you get the other sequences

that you don't particularly care for and they're not very good. It has a more advanced power-up system than anything we've talked about so far, but that's, I mean... Do you want to get into that? Yeah, I mean, we can get into it. So I think this may be the first one

where you can actually speed up that we've talked about so far, which is, you know, if you think about like Gradius and stuff like that is a given. But it's not like Gradius where you have a bar where you can choose things. I believe it's like first power-up

increases speed. Second, changes the gun to kind of like a twin shot sort of deal and I think even further increases the speed a little bit. The third one allows for more, I think, continuous ground bombs

at a higher rate of speed. And the fourth one does more to the gun, so I think it shoots in like three directions. And the fifth upgrades to kind of like a flame gun. sort of thing. I think it's called the Psycho Flame

I read, which can like take out a lot of stuff with just a single shot. But it's one of those games where if you die, you lose everything. Yes. Yeah. So you, I don't know the one credit clear for this. It's not very high on my list to learn. But I would imagine it's, you know, surprise, surprise for a shooter. Like if you, maybe in this case, even if you get hit, like you might as well just start over or something.

that old Gratius style I remember mostly playing the NES one I don't think I've ever put a lot of time in the arcade one That's the case for most people I certainly did not play the arcade game Until like long after I played the NES one You know I Never played the NES one until I covered it

For my video series There was just something about it that did not appeal to me I mean I saw it promoted in Nintendo Power And I saw ads for it And at the time, you know, if Capcom's name appeared in the box, I was like, I need to own that. But this was the one where I just kind of said, yeah, no, I just don't want to do this. But, you know, I will say that the NES version juices up the side-scrolling segments a lot. There's much more interest and variety to those on NES.

Although they kind of fall apart when you get to the bosses because the boss of each area, It's still more interesting than the ones in arcades, which are just like, here's a wall with a bump and you shoot the bump. Like, that's it? Okay. These are like the wall with the bump, but then the wall starts to emerge from the side of the screen, and it's, you know, kind of like this almost like a cylinder that tapers and it's got guns on the sides. And the further you get into the game, the more guns and targets there are and the more difficult it is to avoid them. And it just feels like, oh, it's just the same guy, but now he's harder, and it wears after a while. But I think I kind of unfairly overlooked this one, because it is pretty good as an NES game.

Just not as good as Lifeforce, which showed up at the same time and is such a better take on the dual aspect, shoot him up. So. Life Force sits a very high bar. It does, yeah. I remember, the first time I played this, I was in college, actually, very late. The NES version? The NES version. I was friends with a guy who was a big shooter fan, and this was one of his short list of NES shooters that he really loved. So he had me borrow it for a while, and I did not love it as much as he did, but I saw where he was coming from.

I think there's good ideas here, like you said, Lifeforce does them better. but I don't know like that really necessarily takes away from legendary wings. So it's a lesser game, but I think it's still pretty good. It doesn't tell you to go up and go right like Life Force Guns. But the NES one didn't do that either. I don't need a guy talking to me, telling me how to play a video game. No tutorials, thank you. All right, so after Legendary Wings,

Capcom went back to the well in 1987 for 1943. And this is To my mind, one of the great vertical shooters, it's so good and so well thought out, the systems all interlock and really force you at every moment of the game to kind of manage your available resources and know the sacrifices you have to make. And, you know, the tradeoffs, you're kind of juggling at all times. It has an incredible soundtrack. One of the, like the, it's just one tune, really.

like the kind of actual soundtrack but yeah not just drumming sounds I mean that soundtrack gets me pumped like I want to go out and blow up just the hell out of the Japanese Navy when I hear that music I'm like I'm sorry Japan I like you

but I've got to sync all your ships now and it's it's basically 1942 redux but now it's cooperative and now there's much more variety to how it plays because it has a two phase level structure

So the first phase of each level is like 1942 where you're fighting ships in the air, but then you close in on your naval target and the game kind of automatically causes you to descend. And then you're fighting really close over the surface against some planes, but mostly against the ships. And you're trying to take out as many targets on each ship as possible while avoiding their return fire. and there's a lot more variety to how the enemy carriers and battleships can fire at you like they have the little tiny bullets

they have kind of like a longer tracer bullet that fires in kind of like rows and are very dangerous and then they have these like the firework things there's like these spiraling fires that come at you and they're very unpredictable and make things very challenging

but you know that's that's a lot to balance and that's just you know kind of the targets, you've also got the power-up system and the fuel system, both of which are kind of interlinked and also both of which have a lot of limitations on them that force you to be smart. So instead of just, you know, basically getting double firepower, and this time you have a variety of different power-ups you can get. And those appear as icons, and it steals just straight up takes an idea from Twinby and allows you to shoot the power up icons to change what they are so you can cycle through them and the weapons have different

functionality like there's um you know basically like a stream of missiles that fire are like super shells I guess that just tears through everything but you also have a shotgun which has a wide arc and short range but any incoming bullet will be destroyed by the shotgun blasts which is not the case with other weapons, you have the spread gun, which is kind of the easy go-to, you know, same as Contra,

like, oh, yeah, I've got this now. It's what I'm sticking with. But that's not necessarily what you want because sometimes, you know, in close quarters you want the shotgun. But anytime you pick up a power-up, a timer starts,

and you only have so long to use the power-up before it runs out unless you can top it up with another icon of that same weapon type, and then that'll extend the timer on it. And so it really, you know, this is an auto-scrolling shooter and you kind of have to take your opportunities when you can get them to power up. But it creates this kind of element of, you know, like really sweating it out. Like, you know, I've got to get as much done as I can before my special weapon upgrade disappears.

And also, where can I find another one? And do I want to focus on, you know, tuning this icon to be what I want by shooting it or do I need to focus my fire on other enemies? or on other targets like enemies. It's just, you know, you're constantly calculating, like, what am I doing? What do I need to do here? And it's just so good. And that doesn't even get into the fuel mechanic. This is no longer a single hit-kill game, but instead you have a fuel meter that depletes

steadily as you fly, and you can top it off by getting power-ups. But also, when you take damage, it depletes a big chunk of fuel. So it kind of works as a shield. and when you get down to no fuel, you can still fly, but you can't take any more hits. And also, it debilitates your special attack, which is not just a loop anymore. When you run out of fuel, then you resort to looping, but you can expend fuel kind of like, you know, Hager using his spin attack in final fight, yeah, to summon either a lightning storm in the air or to summon a tsunami to wipe out sea-based targets.

It's just so good. It's such a well-crafted, well-integrated set of abilities and powers and hazards and other factors and considerations. And sometimes you shoot in the sky and a cow appears, and it's worth a lot of points. It's very zebious there, just having, like, hidden things you can, like, hit in certain spots for extra points. And I believe you can still do the,

loop if you hit both buttons together. Oh, okay. So that's still an option for you. And I'm fairly certain that doesn't expend any fuel just when you hit the button to do your lightning attack and whatnot. So like the degree of depth that this has versus 1942 is just kind of nuts. 1942, I feel like, is a score game. Like, you're playing that to get a high score and what other incentive do you have to last

that one. But I feel like from this point on, and, like, the games we're going over, and I mean, shooters are kind of moving this way in general, just historically, but, you know, you still obviously do have that score element, but, like, the systems are getting complex enough to where you have an incentive, like, because you actually have to, like, learn the game, like, with these different types of power-ups. You're like, okay, what's going to happen next? Do I need to switch to the shotgun?

Do I need to switch to the triple shot? Like, which one is beneficial to me with what I'm going into right now? So you move into like being able to play for things and more than just score. Yeah, having an idea of what's coming from repeated playthroughs or I guess watching a video playthrough of it. Yeah. Helps you sort of think about that. And, you know, even because the power ups just sort of float around if I remember, right? So even when you pick them up, it has to be a consideration.

Like do you want to rush in and get it or do you want to hold off for a few seconds just so it'll last a little bit longer until, Yeah, the power-ups do scroll off-screen. Eventually. But you can also kind of keep them on the screen longer by shooting at them. And it'll push them forward while also causing them to cycle through their different powers. Yeah, so when you pick them up, also very important. I really enjoyed this game a lot. I think it holds up remarkably well.

Even now, it may not have the complex scoring systems that a lot of later shooters get. but the actual gameplay complexity is very interesting, and I really like the fuel system a lot. It's such a nice change from, you know, the single hit kills. One thing I dug up about this when I was looking through gamest stuff, every time I'm playing an arcade game that I know is like a big hit. I usually like to look at gamus to see, like, where they're readers and where they put it. And back then they had a category for income, like the amount of

Incomic cabinet brought in, and unsurprisingly, I guess this one was like the second place for that year. And it was just, it was between our type at number one and double drag at number three. Wow. It paints an interesting picture. It's a very popular game, basically. Well, and also it's got cooperative play like Double Dragon. In fact, that kind of replaces the flanking planes.

You can't get those in this one. That's true. I think the idea is that you don't need flankers because you've got a wing. man, assuming that you play with another person, which is canonically the correct way to play. So, you know, you kind of boost your firepower by having another person fly with you, but then you have to share the icons with them and share the power-ups. And who wants to do that? It's a, it's very interesting to play it with another person because then you have to be like mindful and like communicating who gets what power up and when or unless you just want

swap back in fours, I guess that's an option too. Playing that way sucks. That's right. Remember when you and I tried to do cooperative Darius and I'm like, boy, the game is so much less fun this way. But Darius does not give you a lot of power-ups generally, so I feel that's

kind of working against you. A bit more generous than that. So this one also had an NES port that like a lot of Capcom games at this point changed up the dynamics somewhat. It's not really that different in terms of how the game is structured and how the rules and mechanics work,

but it does add this element of permanence and growth. You earn skill points by, you know, achieving different things in combat. And then at the end of a stage, you can invest those points in different power-ups and they become permanent upgrades. So you can increase your fuel capacity, the duration, of special attacks, the power of your attacks, et cetera.

So it's actually a pretty good system. I think that the NES version kind of lacks the compelling, just audio visual experience of the arcade machine for obvious reasons. I would love to see, you know, a port that kind of combines the arcade visuals and sound with that sort of permanence and, you know, the idea of your in it for the long haul of the NES version. That would be like the perfect 1943 for me. Yeah, I really did like the upgrade

system on that one. I finally did play the NES one because I did not actually play this one until maybe a decade ago on NES. But I think it was actually your video that had me sit down with it in more detail and recognize

that, oh, hey, this is actually a really cool idea. I love how they implement this. Especially because then I can just up that fuel capacity as much as I want, within reason. So, yeah, I feel like this was kind of a big moment for Capcom. Like, this, you know, this really sort of defined how their shooters would advance going forward. Although, before we get to those more advanced games, we do come to Last Dual, Interplanet War,

a game that I've never seen or heard of otherwise. And it's a weird one. I don't, I mean, it's almost more like a racing game in some respects than a shooter. but then that's only for some of the stages and then other stages are basically them doing Life Force but badly So even the high speed stages it's kind of like how Gradius will always

have like a high speed step near the end where you have to just navigate through a twisty little passage Yeah I mean Life Force gives you a top down speed zone So this is just that Except they put it at the front of the game instead of the end Yeah I don't know this is a strange one you do get a lot of firepower, like your ship can accumulate a lot of offensive power

with like huge spread beams and flanking devices and things like that. And enemies are throwing a lot more stuff at you. And some of the stages are very, very fast. Some of them are very slow. But it feels like you're starting to see a move toward the Don Maku bullet hull style with this one, just barely, just like hints of it. But compare it to the 1940 games that had come before, it does feel like it's starting to edge in that direction. And this was 1988.

I'm always kind of surprised by how early the Don Maku style sort of solidified because I think of it as more of a late 90s thing, but it really wasn't. So there's kind of a lot of rapid evolution happening in the shooter genre right around this time. So, you know, five years after 1943, the genre is almost unrecognizable. It's something totally different than it had been before. Yeah, it strikes me as, you know, this genre is very popular in Japan, at least historically. I can't speak to it right now more so than in the West. And I think also because you have such like an arcade culture over there at the time, there was probably a lot of people who were getting very good at these games,

and therefore you had to up the difficulty and you had to sort of up the ante compared to what previous games has done and how do you do that? You throw more objects on screen that you have to navigate around and you go from there to having these like intricate bullet curtains that they have to get through

as opposed to just having enemies firing shots at wherever you are. And I mean like time proved that there was an unreasonable limit to this. see Gradius 3. Yeah. So, like, you can definitely take it a little too far. But for last...

In which sense? Do you mean the way that it, like, slows the hell down because there's so much happening? Or just that if you don't have the slowdown, it's so unreasonable. I mean, honestly, even with the slowdown, it's pretty unreasonable. I don't know how far you've made it into that game, but there's a part where, like, these blocks are kind of coming at you from the other side of the screen. I think that's as far as I've made it. random pattern and like you can just see people absolutely bash their heads up against this it almost feels like a game where even if you're willing to learn it you're going to get smacked in the face uh by parts that you just almost can't really learn or at least up to a certain point that's not last duel particularly and i haven't made it far enough in last duel to even say really but yeah those those those japanese developers and players were getting too good

They need their yen. And that is why in 1988, Capcom published 1943 Kai, which is not just a harder version of 1943, but it is. It's a much harder, much faster, more challenging version of 1943. But it also totally remixes the enemy patterns and the stage layout such as they are,

adds more visual variety, and kind of gives you like a science fiction element to it. It's sort of like an all- reality in 1943 where you have laser beams and somehow you're flying in a biplane instead of an American military fighter and all the enemy planes are pink and it just it just has this kind of really strange vibe to it like they they didn't radically overhaul the look of the game but they tweaked it to create something that feels very alien and unfamiliar but it's also really, really unforgiving.

It's so hard. I remember being really excited to play this on Capcom Generations on Saturn and plugged it in and it just demolished me in like the first stage. And I said, you know what? Maybe it's time for me to take my leave from this genre.

It's 1943 for Superplayers. Yeah, for sure. I don't think I've really spent any time with Kai now that we're talking about it. I haven't either and that's because it just trashes me Yeah, I think that'll do it Not a ton but my

For better or worse Whenever I hear about a game like this Like it just intrigues me even more And I'm like, no, I want to learn it So who knows I have to get a little bit better In regular 1940 first A glutton for punishment

Yeah, what can I say So from what I can tell Capcom took 1989 off from vertical shooters, focusing on things like, I don't know, Mega Man and Ducktails and Final Fight. Geez. Area 88. Yeah. So instead of we jumped to 1990 and they travel back in time to 1941 for 1941 counterattack,

which kind of has a bit of that sci-fi feel to it, but not extremely compared to some of the later games. But definitely, like, it's moving away from, you know, like, here are the actual participants you would have seen in World War II to something a bit less grounded in reality. And interestingly, this is not based in the Pacific theater. It's the first time, maybe the only time, the 1940s series moves into the European theater. and you're playing, I think, as a British attacker going after the German army with your ultimate goal being to sink the bismarck. So they're taking advantage of the fact that it is 1941 because like all of these things, you know, 1943 you're sinking the Yamato.

1941, you're sinking the bismarck. So they're tying it very loosely. Like here is a ship, a really famous ship that was destroyed in this year. So let's make a game about that. But this one goes way more varied in terms. terms of its design. It's not just like you're flying in the sky over the ocean and then you're flying skimming the surface of the ocean. Like every stage, there are far fewer stages than the previous games, but every stage has its own theme and kind of setting. So it's shorter, but much more

varied. Yeah, I did play this one for this episode. And I haven't really spent a lot of time with 1941 because, I don't know, I don't know, between 43 and XX, what are you going to do? But I do like it. I do like some of the concepts here. I think the more, I think the mix of weapons is a lot more fun to deal with or to play with, rather. And they again, change like the mechanics of it around from 1943. Yeah. Yeah, they kind of dropped the fuel mechanic.

and you don't have companion planes but instead you have like Ninja Guidant 2 shadow planes and they I mean it's kind of grottious options but instead of always being there behind you and trailing behind you they just kind of like show up a little bit it's you know like blue shadows and street fighter alpha or something just kind of milking that concept

the the trailing ships the trailing planes shadow planes can't be destroyed but they do double your firepower or triple it. And in this one, they reset every stage, don't they? Or is that a later one? I think that's correct. Okay.

And there's some sort of mechanic that I haven't figured out where you can like spin your plane. Is that replacing the loop? Yeah, so the second button in this is kind of that, you know, lightning kind of attack again, but instead of costing you fuel, it costs you life. But as far as I can tell, they remove the hit two buttons to do the,

loop and you do the loop when you do the second button attack. So they've kind of like taken a low cost evasive option away from you a little bit. But no, there's there's another maneuver that I've seen in videos and I don't know how to do it, but it like causes your plane to like spin. Like do the 360 spin. Yeah, it does like a yeah like a 360 spin and you shoot in you know eight directions. I did it accidentally a few times and I could not figure out how to do it consistently. I feel like that's one of those things that... Is it like a Zankeith thing, 360 rotation and a tag? You know, I did try that. It didn't work. I did try the 360. It didn't work.

No, I feel like that's one of those maneuvers that I should have sat down and looked at the instruction card or whatever for this game. Yeah, I watch videos of people playing this game. I'm like, why couldn't I ever do that? What's happening here? I want to do that. It does have charge shots for the first time. It does do charge shots. which, you know, I always enjoy a good charge shot, which is probably why I enjoyed messing with this game. It doesn't have some of the mechanics of the charge shots, the really cool mechanics of the charge shots to come later, but it's like, it's more just a simple, like, you can charge your shot and it will be more powerful, and it doesn't really go beyond that yet. But soon. Yeah. But, like, the big shell attack with the charge shots are always fun.

So I feel like this one leans even more in the direction of manic shooting. There's tons of tiny ships. Everything's shooting at you. Tons of projectiles. And there's a real mix of attack types that you're dealing with that starts to resemble kind of what you expect from Don Makus. So there's lots of little bullets flying in kind of chaotic patterns. and they all are circles and they pulsated with color, but then those are sort of complemented by force beams

and larger projectile attacks that are much more focused. So those are the things that you kind of want to really avoid, but at the same time, the smaller bullets are more dynamic and force you to be mindful of how you evade the big attacks. So again, you're really kind of starting to see the direction that the genre would have, evolve in the hands of other developers. And we can talk about Don Maku games and some other episode.

That's not an expert space for me. So I'm not even going to pretend to tell you how things like Dodampashi came into existence. I don't know. But I do like the variety of settings here. You have battles over the open ocean, but not until later in the game. And in the meantime, you're fighting through like a shipyard, which is kind of like a channel carved into almost like a canyon through the water, then you're fighting across like a railway system and trying to blow up machines that are being toaded across the rails

and so forth and kind of moving further and further toward, I guess, the heart of Germany before reaching the Bismarck. So, you know, fighting advanced airfighter bosses and so forth toward the end of the game. It just, you know, it's moving away from historical accuracy, so to speak, into something that's more just like, here's video games, man, just have fun. We wanted to draw some cool stuff. And they really, like, just drop the historical side of things for the future 1940 games. They're just going all in on the weird stuff and, I don't know, aliens attacking.

1944 feels like it's something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, really from this point on, Capcom's internally developed vertical shooters would just be part of this franchise. They kind of moved away from doing anything else. I mean, technically the next game, 1992's VARTH Operation Thunderstorm,

is not a 1940X game, but it really feels like they were just, like this is a 1940X game that's a little too weird. for us to call it 1940X although that didn't stop them

with 19XX so who knows but yeah VARTH VARTH Operation Thunderstorm plays like a lost entry in the

1940X series it's fully futuristic goes all in on sci-fi you know you replace the flanking

biplanes with pods straight out of R-type so I mean when you're starting to lean into R-type

you know you've just gone all in And you have, like, those two different modes you can pick for them, right? Like, they can be fixed just kind of, like, straight in front of you, or they can be the Japanese version of the board calls them fuzzy mode, where they kind of sort of automatically move according to something. I believe in Star Trek Voyager, those are called variable nacelles, variable geometry missiles. But they attempt to, like, block fire that's coming in around you, though I, admittedly, I've not. spent a ton of time with VARs, but my initial impression was, like, Fuzzy Mode was a little too unreliable for me.

Like, I'd almost rather have them up front and position myself where they need to be, but I don't know, like, the tech for this game, so I could be totally wrong on that. Yeah, I mean, even though this is not presented as a 1940X game, I feel like there are stages, a bunch of stages that just come straight out of 1940X. Like, there's especially toward the middle of the game a stage that takes place over the water and you're gunning down battleships

and they have identical structures and attack patterns, including like the spinning firework things, to the ships you face in 1943. So it's just straight up, like, in 19443 and all but name, the honorary member of the

10 of the press. It also has a voice that says power up. That sounds a lot like the voice in alternate beats. Like a lot. And, you know, another thing that varies from 1940X is that you have a ton of weapon options and they don't have timers on them. Like once you get it, you hang on until you die. So it kind of takes away that element of, you know, how am I going to hang on to this and just let you focus on pure attacking. And I feel like that's kind of the direction the series would go in general is, like,

don't worry so much about the timer, just blow the hell out of stuff. This one goes back to checkpoints weirdly. And I don't think the 19 XX series ever does that again. But yeah, you don't just immediately respond on the spot and continue on the spot. It's like, nope, back to checkpoints for you. Don't know. I'm gonna. And so.

I'm not. I'm Thank you. So after VARTH, we skip ahead three years to 1995, and we find 19XX, which it's the final internally developed 1940X, game. After this, the sequels and remakes and stuff would all be farmed out. But this one is, so far as I can tell, internally developed at Capcom. And so it's kind of their final statement on the series, even though there would be other games in the franchise. And, you know, this one does kind of the same thing as VARTH and doesn't shy away from it for once. It's just

alternate reality. And you're basically, the stories that you're fighting through a fictional war and trying to prevent a nuclear holocaust. And actually the final stage is fought along the length of giant nuclear missiles that are launching up and you're trying to stop those from heading out. But I don't know if you're successful because the capsules break off at the top and launch off the screen and then you have to fight a giant stealth fighter instead. So it's Dr. Strange Love has failed. But this one, I would say, you know, by 1995, bullet hell is a thing it's established and this one is just

100% that and maybe this is where someone who knows that genre better than I do should talk about it and explain this term the term bullet hell bullet hell or Don Maku, bullet curtain whatever you want to call it or just what even that is

and how that differs from the more traditional shooters. Sure well I mean and maybe we can tag team this cabin but I mean I would like my you know I guess it's not really a pitch but my elevator pitch for a Don Maku would be like

you have bullets a lot of bullets appearing on the screen at once in waves or curtains I guess is where the the Makku part of Don Maku comes from that look immediately to the average person

to just be like what what am I supposed to do with this there's no way through this but the trick is that though it may not be obvious your ship has a very small hitbox compared to the actual size of the ship itself on screen. And games at this point did not really particularly make it that obvious what the size of that hitbox was, so you kind of have to experiment.

But the idea is you have just enough gaps in these very complex patterns to kind of weave through them and not take damage. And frequently, you know, these games also have a lot of slowdown. Yes. I think that's just them using the hardware to their advantage. because you can use that slowdown to sort of navigate through the more difficult patterns. They don't come at you fast typically. They're just meant to be intimidating just in sheer number.

And sometimes they're like targeted at you, just like in older games. And in those cases, the idea is that you are sort of maneuvering around the screen in such a way that they're always like firing at where you are not going to be going. So you're kind of leading the bullets on. almost as well. And I mean, this came out in real, like, absolute sicko territory for shooter fans. Because you had, like, Battle Grega, which is, like, I... Batsugan. Probably up on the chart of shooters where it's, like, you just have to become a complete insane person to, like, learn this game. So, yeah, we were definitely in that territory.

Yeah, at least I don't think you have to deal in 19x X with rank at, like, purposely dying, so the game is manageable. Yeah, I mentioned earlier that one of the games, and it's just totally blinked, maybe it was last duel, kind of combines like sprays of bullets with the bigger, like, force beams and stuff. And I feel with Don Maku, you have that combination, but then there's the additional element of non-targeted bullets that just come in massive waves. And so while you're dealing with those other two factors, like the kind of fixed, dangerous, you know, wide spanning energy beams and missiles and things like that, and the tiny little bullets that are homing in on you, you also just have like patterns of bullets that are not safe. It's like creating danger zones all across the screen. So it's just one more thing for you to have to deal with.

And I feel like when you start to think of it, that way, it becomes manageable, as opposed to, like, when you look at it for the first time and you're like, what? But that doesn't mean I'm any good at it and can actually play these games. It definitely takes practice. Yeah. You've got to kind of want to learn how to deal with them, for sure. Yeah, like, I've never finished this game. I've gotten a few stages into it, but even back in the day, there's only so many coins I had with me to credit feed.

So I would say in addition to, or maybe because of the move to Don Maku, this really feels different from previous 1940X games just in terms of the complexity of the systems. I mean, I was gushing about 1943's complexity and just how many interlocking systems there are for you to manage and, you know, to kind of keep in mind from moment to moment as you play. this takes all of that out there's no like interesting fuel system or risk reward tradeoffs with your weapons it's just like

avoid bullets everything is really focused singularly around avoiding bullets and they did this is what I alluded to earlier with the last 1940 game they took the simple charge shot mechanic in this one

and turned it into something that honestly I think is pretty cool. Like if you charge shot a larger target, you know, not a popcorn enemy that won't just blow up in one hit, you automatically lock onto it. And then you can just start mashing on the fire button to just send out these homing shots to it.

And that lets you focus on, you know, dodging shots while still getting your offense in, which, you know, that's something, I think a lot of the, like, indie shooters, really popular ones in Japan. Oh, um...

How am I forgetting the name is? Oh, no. Toho. Yes. Yes. It's something a lot of the Toho shooters do with their sort of central character. Like, she has homing shots so you can focus on dodging while still getting your offense in. I really appreciate that.

Yeah. You can charge the bombs, too, by the way, and smart bombs. I didn't realize you could charge the bombs. That's amazing. What happens when you charge a smart bomb? Because I feel like, like, a smart bomb, yeah, I mean, a smart bomb, in itself is like it's clearing the screen.

So what happens when you charge up a screen clearing attack? I would have to go back and look at this one, but I think it might be that the bombs weren't. I think they, they, it's either, it's either range or it's just damage. So like, for example, if you're using bombs for a boss, like, and you just boom, bomb, that's going to do, you know, X amount of damage. And if you charge it, I think it does, you know, X plus whatever it charged. time amount of damage. So yeah, for screen clearing purposes, I don't think it does a lot to

charge it, but if you're just saving all your bombs to get through bosses and things, I think that's right. Makes sense. So, yeah, a very different take on the series, and it even looks really different. You know, by this point they've kind of moved to, I don't think these graphics are pre-rendered, but they have that look to them where it's very sort of a lot of subtle gradients and solidity to things, kind of like a three-dimensional element to it, that, even though it's hand-drawn, it doesn't look pixelated. Which, you know, I could take it or lead it.

Sometimes it works. They're trying to set themselves apart now that there's all these 3D games coming along and 2D games are looking a little long in the tooth. Like, this is the same time around when you had Polestar and the NeoGeo doing the same thing, or what's the other one, Ragnagard? I think was a fighting game that did the same sort of graphics. So I think they were just trying their best to make it stand out, even though it kind of looks like crap, you know, 30 years later.

Yeah. Oh, 30, wow. Yeah, I don't like that either. That's fair. So I feel like the 1940X series and the Capcom lineage of vertical shooters just kind of fizzles out. You jump ahead five years to 2000 for the final forward. step in the 1940x series 1944, the loopmaster.

They finally moved beyond 1943. Street Fighter could get there. By God. So can 1940 something. So the loopmaster is interesting because it's not developed by rising, or not developed by Capcom, but rather by rising. And it

has a horizontal aspect ratio, which is different than all the other games to discuss so far. All of those were meant to be on vertical monitors. This one is not. And I kind of personally hate it. I don't enjoy playing this game. I feel like the move to a horizontal monitor

it creates a really wide field of play, but it just makes it feel cramped compared to the other games in the series. And I liken it to a Game Boy Advance port of a console game where they just cut out, crop out a huge chunk of screen information. There were lots of them that did that. I didn't have Final Fight in mind, but yes, that's correct.

Actually, I was thinking Mega Man and Bass. Oh, man, that's a rough one. Yeah. I know there was sort of a move towards these sort of vertical shooters on horizontal screens just because, like, the CPS2 setups usually use that. Naomi usually use that. And I know there are even some good kinds. console ones,

console exclusive games. But it's definitely something that's hard to do right. And this game does have really chunky ships and everything that you have to sort of deal with. But I do like the loop charge arrangement

in it a lot. I think that helps save the game a little bit. Do you want to talk about this? Because you are, after all. The loop master. Yeah. So in this one you have the charge, right? And the charge takes a while. but if you stop charging, like it'll slowly deplete so you can sort of do it in chunks.

And once it's fully charged when you let go, your ship will sort of do a loop up to a higher elevation and then you have a few seconds to just shoot down on enemies in such a way that they cannot hit you back. Yeah. And you can't do the loop just on its own anymore. They still take them out. But like in the other games, like if you're looping,

you are invincible more or less. Like they can't hit you and you can hit them. And it's really helpful against bosses, I'll tell you that. And just generally those really difficult sequences. So it's another game where knowing what to expect lets you know when you want to fully charge your shot, although it's good to just have it largely all the way there whenever you get the opportunity.

Yeah, I feel like the emphasis on the loops and a lot of other elements like the Morse code sound effects and the fact that the music is kind of really quiet in the mix compared to the sound effects. I feel like they were deliberately trying to embrace 1942, kind of doing like the Mega Man 9 thing, reaching back to Mega Man 2, but not as successfully. And I feel like the value of 1944

is that it shows you what 1940X shouldn't be. So that means when Capcom decides to bring this back and give a cool indie dev, the green light, to create 1945, They can say, make a game that is not like this. So thank you, Rising. I'll do a quick aside because there were a couple of 1942 games, like after this. Like in 2008, Capcom published a 1942 Joint Strike for the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

I guess I didn't realize that was a new game. I thought that was just like a 3-D remake. You'd think it was a remake, but no, it's a brand-new game. They pulled in mechanics from all the different previous renditions. I can't remember which ones from which off the top of my head. But their big thing was the joint strike, which you could only do in two-player mode. And these were like special attacks that both of the ships would be able to use together. Like I think the main one was sort of chain lightning between the two ships.

And then you could just sort of fly between enemies and they would get sapped. It was okay. Backbone developed it I don't think it was It looks like a game from 2008 That had a very That has a you know Download game budget

But it's okay I think it's I think the funniest part of its legacy Is that for whatever reason They also put out a key art of this Of Street Fighter 2's Cammy Like dressed up like a World War II Like women's course

I mean I don't think it's inexplicable This was 2008 It was 2008 that's true So, like, and she's doing like sort of one of those like airplane pinup poses. I don't know. It's very interesting. And then, uh, I didn't even know about this one until I was looking it up. But according to Hardcore Gaming 101, in 2009, they did a sequel to this called 1942 Joint Strike, or First Strike, sorry, that was also like, it was not a port of Joint Strike.

It was just another new game. I have to bet that this no longer exists, but it has the same sort of weird. touchscreens controls that a lot of other shooters from, say, Cave or what have you, use on iOS. So, they remembered it for a little bit longer, and now they're done with it. Okay. Weird. Yeah. Well, anyway, that is Capcom's vertical shooter legacy. There might be one or two games that I overlooked, but I think this covers the lion's share of them. It really kind of took off with 1942, and that really sort of dominated their work in that field going forward.

But they did, in the late 90s, early 2000s, published some vertical shooters that were not developed internally. I guess, you know, as publishers, they helped fund them and brought them to market, distributed them. And most of these showed up on both arcade machines and on Dreamcast, or in one case, PS2. So they were, I think, trying to kind of keep the style of game alive and working with the developers who were active in that space, like, let's see, Psycheo, Takumi, rising, et cetera, to kind of keep them going. And I feel like, I can't remember what all the relationships there were, but I feel like there was a lot of sort of shared heritage with some of these developers. so, you know, it's probably existing friendships and relationships that turned into business relationships. So, you know, that's admirable, even though I don't know that I necessarily love any of these games, but they're, you know, they were a thing that existed at the time.

And it was nice to see like, hey, here's, you know, this kind of traditional style of game. A lot of times it was traditional pixel art, which was really becoming increasingly scarce at this point. So, you know, I think it's a kind of valuable thing that they did. Along the lines of keeping the Game Boy color alive by bringing external games like Tokitori and Shante and so forth to market, even though there wasn't a lot of money to be made doing that. So, you know, sometimes, sometimes Capcom, there's some good eggs. So I don't know if you guys want to talk about these. I don't have a lot to say, but I'm passingly familiar with all of them such as Gunbird 2, the exciting sequel to mobile light force, force, force.

I've played a bit of Gunbird 2. I've never actually finished this game. It has this very strange mechanic where the stages change order, like they seem kind of random. And they get harder as you go through, right? But you have these unfortunate arrangements where a stage that is particularly difficult will show up really late, as opposed to early on when it would be more manageable. So the levels have

kind of like a dynamic difficulty based on where they fall in the order? Yeah, exactly. And it has a few other very interesting concepts. Like, I think the first Gunbird did this too, where you will defeat enemies and they'll drop

little money icons, but they'll will like flip through their value. And if you touch it at the right time, you get a lot of points, and at the wrong time you get like 10 points or something really pitiful. Yeah, it's very, very twin-be-ish. But I feel like, yeah, this is one of those very, very score-focused shooters that really expects you to focus on these extremely minute play patterns and kind of divide your attention between just surviving

and also trying to max out your score by doing things that are not necessarily conducive to being alive. And I do enjoy that the recurring villains in this game are basically the villains from Yotterman. They are. So it's just Daronjo's gang. I don't even know. I think they might even have gotten the same voice actors.

It's possible. I didn't pay that close of attention. to it, but yeah, if you've ever seen them before you clock it, like, immediately. Yeah, immediately. Off brand, like, yeah. The dollar general brand, Doronjo.

And because it's Capcom, when they ported this to Dreamcast, they added in Morgan as a hidden character from Darkstalkers. She's okay. Like, she's not amazing, but she's pretty good. I mean, she fits the theme. There's like a fantasy magic theme. So throw a succubes in there.

Why not? Sure. It's a different sprite than what she usually got at the time, too Wow, a new spray from work? Yeah, it'll never happen again. Did someone get arrested for that? Must be why they went back for Marvel 2 and Capcom versus S&K, I guess. And then a third button is a melee attack, too. Like, you shoot out like a little punching glove or something like that.

Yes, that's the thing is they're like, there's a little meter that fills up that powers up your attack over time, like your main attack, but you can also use that for the close-range melee. You can charge your main attack, too, and so, like, charge and your melee are all tied to that meat. Yeah. It's a neat little game. I recommend checking out. I'm pretty sure the first two are on Switch just without Morgan.

So that takes us to 1999 and Takumi's Gigawing. I kind of feel like this one is flirting with the same gameplay concepts as Ikaruga. where there's an element of interacting with enemy attacks as opposed to just avoiding them. And you have the ability to reflect them back at enemies, which I think is a pretty cool concept. I suck at this game, but I do like the concept there.

I think it's neat. I never really got the hang of the reflection mechanic because it's so central to this game and it's so opposed to how I like to play this genre that I've never really been able to wrap my, head around Gigawing or the sequel, which Capcom did not publish. I think Takmi did it themselves. I also haven't played this game a ton, but like the only thing I really noticed

about it is the reflect gauge refills very quickly. So it's clearly a resource that they want you to use and not like a bomb or it's just like, oh, you better not use too many or else, you know, you're not going to be able to get yourself out of trouble. And it is like invincible upon activation. I think you're almost meant to be able to be able to. to use it sort of in lieu of a bomb, but also taking into account the fact that it is, you know,

a reflection as well because you do, no, I guess you do also have a bomb in this too. Yeah, the reflected bullets do actually, like, hit enemies, if I remember correctly. So it feels like another one of those games where you want to be able to, you want to have played it enough or seen other people

who know what they're doing in it, to know where you want to, like, really build up your reflex, so you get a lot of enemy bullets that you can fire back off. Because the bomb is one of those older ones where it only clears bullets on the screen. It doesn't clear the screen of enemies, so I think it's, they both sort of serve bomb functionalities in a way. Yeah, the bomb is your backup, and you don't have a reflect available. So the other interesting thing about Gigoing is that, from what I understand, and again, I suck at this game, But the story is extremely dynamic, and it changes based on which characters you're playing as.

So it's cooperative play. There are four different characters, and so whether you're playing solo or, you know, playing, depending on the combination of co-op characters, the story changes, and it has good endings and bad endings. So there's a lot of, like, basically, if you play different characters, you'll get a different kind of story experience every time. and it's not radically different, I doubt. But just, you know, the fact that it's always like, oh, this is different than I've seen before. That's kind of a neat concept. Sort of like the Shiki Gami games, but with, I guess, different endings.

In 2000, we have Dima Ho by Rising. I think this was on that S&K Atomus Wave, wasn't it? Was this an al-A-Many game? Was it now? I think Atomis Wave, a Thomas Wave was, I guess, sort of around this time frame, but... I want to say that it was on a Thomas Wave, but maybe I'm wrong. But I've never played this, but I remember. I remember seeing it at the Metrion in San Francisco and just being in love with the enthusiasm of the attract mode because

Invasion from underground. The earth is really hollow. Are you great? You are great. It's so good. It just like it pumps you up. And it almost pumped me up enough to play it, but I never did. I was always busy.

Is this one on PS2? I don't remember ever showing up on Dreamcast. I don't think this has ever had a home port. I think it has. Now I regret not playing it because I assumed, you know, this will show up on some system and it didn't. You couldn't tell by the name they gave it here, but this is like a sequel. This is a part of the Maho-Di-Soxen series. There was Maho-Di-Soxan, and there was Shippu Maho-Di-Soxan Kingdom Grand Prix, which is a mouthful.

And this is great Maho-Di-Soxin. You know what? They all have that sort of energy. That makes sense to me now. They're all very like hyperbolic. I think maybe the first Maho Dai Soxan, I think one of them got like an M2. Yes, the first one got. But only in Japan.

Yeah. So you didn't get the Western release. That is apparently much easier. This one I think is lost. I think one of the reasons it's lost is because this is the only one of these latter-day games that has a vertical screen aspect ratio. All the others just said, okay, fine, we'll give into the tyranny of televisions. and rotated themselves and, you know,

built their gameplay around a horizontal orientation. But Dima Ho said, no, we are great. And you can't be great without a vertical screen. So I think that just kind of ruled it out for modern systems. But, you know, maybe Switch 2. You're going to say, we need M2 to come back

to the Shot Triggers series. Yeah, we need Switch 2 and FlipGrip 2. kind of wrapping up here there's in 2000 also Mars Matrix the last game the last bullet hell shooter I gave a serious attempt to figuring out and this is where I said

no I can't do it but it was very accessible it was a Dreamcast home release and I believe it was released at a budget price of like 20 bucks wasn't it? Yeah I got it back in the day and got absolutely nowhere in it But it was fun.

But I figured, you know, for 20 bucks, I can attempt to at least do this. And wow, it's hard. It is a really, really fast bullet hell shooter. It is extremely focused on reflex, twitch skill, and really focusing on everything, like every possible hazard on the screen. And, you know, part of that is that it super simplifies the gameplay. a lot of reviewers at the time made a lot of noise about the fact

that this is a game that you play with a single button how primitive is that but you don't want Yeah you don't want to mess with multiple buttons in a game like this you need to just like dodge

and hit the attack button as quickly as you can and it has a pretty cool visual style it's um you know this one was 3D wasn't it? It's been a while since I've played pseudo 3DI thing. I think it's kind of got a pre-rendered look to it.

Yeah, okay, so maybe it is pre-rendered. But it has that kind of futuristic look that you see from like a Riden or Einhand or something. So it kind of stands out from the more either sort of realistic or cartoonish look of the other shooters in this list. So, you know, I really want to like Mars Matrix, but God, it's just beyond. me. I'm a sad old man. Sadder and older now than I was 25 years ago. I have to say the

first stage music in this game is not good, but it's stuck in my head. Whenever I hear about Mars Matrix just like flashes me back like Nam. This is another kind of reflect game too. It's only one button.

And if you just tap the button, you will just do a normal shot. But like, If you don't hit it for a second, and then you press it in close range, you'll kind of get this piercing, almost like, melee thing. And then you have a meter where when that builds, and you charge the button for a little bit, it activates this barrier that makes contact. When it makes contact with enemies, it pretty much destroys them. But it also attracts the bullets to you. And if you release the button before the gauge depletes, you fire off all the bullets that are attracted to you. back. So, like, it's more mechanically deep than probably a lot of reviewers realized, even

though it's a single button. But, yeah, it's, it's difficult for sure. Takami really loved their reflect buttons. Yeah. And God bless them. They were trying something. And then finally, one that almost doesn't really fit this, uh, this description, but they did publish it in Japan. And it was notable for being a very early game for, early shooter for PlayStation 2, and that's Sylphi 2, the Lost Planet, which was developed by Treasure in conjunction with game arts, and was the sequel

to the FMB, FMV based vertical shooter for Sega CD. Yeah, Sega CD, and I think even before that there was like... I think there was a PC version. Yeah, there was a PC 88 or something.

Which I think is on Switch now. I think the right console. Anyway, it's very different. than any of the other fighters here and much more of like the cinematic zooming around kind of view. But I don't know,

it's a follow-up to a fairly well-known and well-liked game from a previous generation. So good on you for funding that Capcom. Way to go. Played a lot like the first selfie

on Sega CD. It's just, you know, prettier. Yeah. And that is, to my knowledge, Capcom's Vertical Shooter Legacy. And like I said, there are horizontal shooters

and also the sort of player-guided ground-based shooters like Commando, but we don't have time to talk about those this episode. So we have to stop now and get on with classic gaming in the Midwest while there's still a little time left. So thank you both, Kevin and Brian, for your time. Do you have any final thoughts on the Capcom shooters Anything we haven't said already?

I don't know. You know, I think it's very interesting that you can sort of see Capcom's take on trends in the genre over time, right up to them just sort of outsourcing and publishing other people's games in the late 90s when the genre was starting to fall off. Yeah, I don't think they really invented

too many trends in shooting games, but, like, they did a pretty remarkable job of keeping up with them in some of these. And, like, you could, you could do a lot worse if you really wanted to deep dive into shooters of just about any era than picking some of these Capcom games. Yeah. It's a real, like, refinement versus innovation from Capcom. They saved all that for Mega Man.

Yeah. The Street Fighter. Of course. Hmm. That sounded sarcastic. Yeah, so some really great games in there, some all-time, classics, like you said, maybe not inventing anything particularly

new, but looking through the progression of these games, you can really see how the shooter evolved and how Capcom tried to stay relevant, if not, you know, necessarily being the one steering the changes. So

good on them. And, you know, it gave us 1943, and that's nothing to sneeze at. You can also really see Capcom petering out of the arcade space over time. because I don't think it was really doing great for them in the 90s. And early 2000s, they just sort of threw up their hands and said, all right, we're out to make more devil may cry.

So that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts. You, of course, have listened this far, so you're going to listen to me tell you how you can listen to more Retronauts because you want to. You can find us on many, many podcast. Downloading devices and platforms, basically everything except Spotify. And I guess not YouTube. Okay, so most of the platforms, except the really popular ones.

And of course, if you really enjoy the show, you can support us on Patreon, since that's how we pay for it. You can go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and subscribe to us at the basic level. You get access to every episode a week early at a higher bit rate quality. with no advertisements. If you pay even more than that, you get Discord access, bonus episodes available only to patrons,

weekly columns, and even more cool stuff like that. So check it out, patreon.com slash retronauts. That is my pitch. Kevin, what's your pitch? You can find me on blue sky at Atariarchive.org,

which is my website and a YouTube channel that I've been doing for several years now that I'm reviewing. reviewing, I'm sort of trawling through the history of the Atari 2,600 platform and its games in chronological order, and using that as sort of a leaping off point to get into the histories of genres and hardware and all sorts of fun things. If you like that, I also have a book out through

limited run games, Atari Archive Volume 1. So check that out, if you will. Brian? For me, I'm on Blue Sky's B. Clark O.N.P. uh one million power.com is where you can go to check out a lot of the translation work i've done for various weirdo japanese game things including a lot of things about shooters uh and music as well uh i also have a youtube channel that just turned one year old fairly recently uh i haven't covered much shooter stuff on there yet but i am in the middle of the series of the series called scrolling down the belt that's going through games in the beat-em-up genre like mostly chronologically maybe we'll get to shoot her someday uh there's pay

Patreon for that as well, if you'd like that. And also, if you are interested in both Japanese, I should say, old Japanese games and music, I have a book for you called Gameplay Harmonies that is available from limited rungames.com or Amazon. And if you were here at Midwest Gaming Classic, you could have bought one right here. You missed out. You know, I will add that you do have the uh your one credit clear series of videos on your youtube too i do that's true there's a couple shooters in there there's a there's one route of dryus in there there's gratius in there uh space and well you can't one credit clear space invaders but you can sure try to get a high score in it so yeah more more shooter stuff to come in that venue at the very least and finally i jeremy parrish

also have a youtube channel and a patreon and a book many books actually one only And you can find more about that by going to the internet and looking for Jeremy Parrish with one R in Parrish. Thank you very much. You can also find me on Blue Sky as J. Parrish.combe.combe.combe. So do check that out. Do support our work. And do come back next week for another episode of Retronauts. In the meantime, I will let you do something else. Thanks. You know, I'm sorry, I'm not I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I don't know. Thank you.