Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 049: Elevator Action II

Episode Date: October 17, 2016

Jeremy muses over one of the greatest arcade games of all time: Taito's oddly out-of-time cooperative shooter, Elevator Action II (Elevator Action Returns if you're nasty). Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts. Rested the old order and create a new society! I achieved a personal milestone this past week. I received a copy of a video game soundtrack released to which I personally contributed. Not as a musician, mind, because the only musical ability I ever possessed evaporated a few years ago when my voice began to shrivel up with age and lose all its range. No, I wrote liner notes for a vinyl compilation of Zuntata soundtracks for Ship to Shore Photo. It's not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It's not like a release this niche focused is precisely going to be a million seller, and other people write

album liner notes all the time. But it's a big deal for me personally, because music has always been an important focus of my work as a member of the Games Press. Maybe not so much in the past few years, but back when gaming websites actually had budget to spend on such things, I always prioritized tracking down and interviewing game composers, especially Japanese game composers. Some of my favorite interviews over the years have been with composers, in fact, from Hireonori Maizawa to Hipp Tanaka to Hironobosakaguchi. I love music, I love games, I love game music, and I love talking to the people who make music for games.

So contributing to a game music project, even in such a small way, was a dream come true for me. But this wasn't just any game music. The Zuntata compilation covers three games, and one of them ranks among my all-time favorites. Elevator Action 2. The LP contains a mix of several different game soundtracks, with the track listing shuffled and arranged to create an involving musical flow rather than simply doling out each game in chunks. The other two titles here are pretty good. Metal Black is a shooter in the Darius vein, and Nightstriker is basically the most 80s racing action game you can imagine. But in my opinion, neither can hold a candle to Elevator Action 2.

The mere fact that Elevator Action 2 ever existed is reason enough for me to love it. It's such an unlikely creation, a sequel to a minor arcade hit, released more than a decade after the original. The original elevator action was a bit of a video game milestone. Debuting in 1983, the game combined 60s-era spy themes and a dollhouse cutaway view of high-rise buildings. If you wanted, you could make a pretty solid case that the original elevator action was the world's first cover shooter. Your journey through skyscrapers filled with enemy agents involved evading gunfire by ducking

behind doors, hopping onto escalators, and of course making use of buildings' remarkably responsive elevator system from which the game took its title. Elevator action used the environment in ways that no game before it ever had, besides making Using use of these features to traverse the buildings and avoid your foes, you could also put the buildings to work for you. Elevators could crush bad guys if you manage to catch them at the top or bottom of a shaft, or you could shoot out light fixtures lining the hallway to detach the device from the ceiling and send it crashing down on a foe's head.

in short elevator action broke a lot of ground for action games i'd like to say the same thing for its sequel but unfortunately that would be a lie elevator action two or elevator action returns as it was called in japan felt like nothing if not a relic debuting in 1994 the game would have seemed a fossil had it debuted on consoles, appearing as it did in the form of an arcade cabinet, it came across almost like some sort of video game trilobite. Let's put this into context. By 1994, arcades had long since abandoned 2D side-scrollers and platformers, which is exactly what elevator action 2 was. The game took many of its cues from Rolling Thunder, a game from 1986, whose final unloved sequel had appeared on Genesis in 1993. Even side-scrolling brawlers had all

but died out by the time Elevator Action 2 appeared, replaced by fighting games. Even that genre was growing long in the tooth. Sprite-based games were fading in the face of slick, 60 frames per second 3D graphics like those seen in Virtua Racing, Virtual Fighter, Daytona USA, and some games not by Sega. On the home console front, Sega's Saturn and Sony's PlayStation were on the cusp of their Japanese debuts. Meanwhile, here was Elevator Action 2, fumbling along as a traditional side-scrolling action game filled with sprites and old-fashioned level design. It had no business being released into arcades in 1994, but Taito did it anyway, and God bless him for it.

Freed of any hope of the game being some runaway success or innovative design landmark, Elevator Action 2's creators could instead focus on just creating the coolest, most exciting, 2D action game they could cram into an arcade cabinet. Their creation does almost nothing new, but everything it does, it does with incredible style, and hilarious over-the-top gusto. You see this brilliantly in the very first mission, which sees you tackling a thematic sequel to the original game. You make your way up, up a skyscraper.

But once you reach the top, the building explodes around you. The facade crumbles away and the villain of the piece flies away in a helicopter, but not before pausing to taunt you. From here, the game breaks away from the modern high-rise buildings of the first game in favor of more varied scenarios. An industrial plant here, followed by a fight through an airport which includes a brief excursion through a parked airplane full of hostages, whose outer skin fades to transparent to reveal the plane's interior

in the series' classic dollhouse style. The characters and mechanics have every bit as much panache as the settings. For starters, Elevator Action 2 takes the two in its name literally, allowing a pair of players to tackle its settings in tandem through drop-in, drop-out cooperative play. You can choose from three different protagonists, all of whom are awesome, and all of whom have some sort of translation error in their names. There's Edie Burritt, whose last name is probably supposed to be Bullet, Kark Bradfield, who's given name should likely be Kurt, and Jad the Taff, whose moniker I'm almost positive was meant to be Jad the Tough. Maybe the nicest thing about these characters is that they defy a long-standing video game tradition. Namely, Edy isn't the fast weak one just because she's the girl. Instead, that distinction goes to cart. Meanwhile, E.D. has fantastic firepower with an excellent

rate of fire and the most impressive sub-weapon in the game, a napalm grenade whose explosions span half the screen and leave behind a lingering fire residue that can cause most standard enemies to burst into flames if they encounter it. Meanwhile, Jad is the big. big guy and can soak up tons of damage, but his weapons aren't nearly as devastating as Edie's. Of course, Elevator Action 2 retains all its predecessors' environmental strategic elements, and then some. As before, you can duck in to practically any door to evade fire. Red doors contain essential classified document discets that you need to collect in order to complete a stage. Many other doors house weapon upgrades or health pickups, similar again to

Rolling Thunder and codename Viper. Elevators don't appear quite as often as in the older game, but they still respond to your commands in a way that would make anyone stuck with a room on the 25th floor of a hotel during a massive convention, jealous. More contemporary environmental elements appear as well, such as the exploding barrels popularized the year before by its doom, and enemies themselves appear in far greater variety than the fedora and trench coat agents from the first game. They range from strong men, linky modified humans with the ability to soak up extra damage, Miami Vice types and Hawaiian shirts, angry Doberman pincers,

and flying soldiers in hazmat suits. In keeping with this improved diversity of characters, you also face them in more diverse scenarios, from armed standoffs atop an oil platform to stealthy building infiltration via sewer tunnels. Elevator Action 2 is a game about Spectacle, a series of strider-like set pieces that unfurled with just enough verticality to remind you that, oh yes, this is an elevator action game. And there's no mistaking the connection in the final mission, which takes place on a series of launch

platforms and an enemy missile base on a strict timer. Failed to stop the launch, and it's a fixed game over, no continues. Taito has only reissued this game a handful of times. First is a Japanese Saturn game whose price was worth. one of the first Saturn imports to Skyrocket. These days, it sits up with the highest collector echelons for the platform along the likes of Panzer Dragoon Saga and Psychic Killer Taromaru. Fortunately, Taito made the game much more accessible through the Taito Legends series

for PlayStation 2 and PC. They're not quite perfect ports, especially on PC, but they're solid enough, and pleasantly inexpensive even now. And elevator action has lived on in other ways, too. Many of the elements that defined the game appeared in a pair of handheld elevator action sequels, the first of which was retooled in the U.S., strangely enough, as a Dexter's laboratory game. And then there was Elevator Action old and new, released for Game Boy Advance in Japan only.

While neither of these games offered the breezy, explosive style of Elevator Action 2, they both featured selectable characters and helpful sub-weapons. Sadly, Elevator Action has largely been forgotten since Square's acquisition of Taito a decade ago, aside from the strange light gun shooter elevator action death parade, and the almost completely overlooked elevator action deluxe for PlayStation 3, it's more or less gone quiet into that good night. But then, could it have done anything else? Elevator Action 2 was peak 2D arcade action, even if it was totally a game out of time,

and I can't imagine anything ever topping such pure platform shooting action. Really, Taito probably should have just dropped the mic right then and there. Attention, Retronauts, Listeners, Attention Retronauts listeners. If you'd like to meet us in person, and of course you would, we'll be doing a panel at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo in beautiful Portland, Oregon. On Sunday, October 23rd, we'll be holding the Retronaut's 10th anniversary panel at 3 o'clock p.m. in Auditorium B. And, of course, you will need to be an attendee of the Portland Retro Gaming Expo to attend.

But it doesn't stop there. Later that night, from 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock p.m. will be holding a private retron's event at Quarterworld, located at 4811 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland. Attendance will be free, not counting Quarterworld's cover charge, but to get in, you must print out a ticket from the event's Eventbrite page and bring it along with you. To find the Eventbrite page, head on over to Retronauts.com or our Facebook page at Facebook.com slash Retronauts. It'll be pinned to the top until the day of the event. We hope to see you there, and remember, you must ask before touching us because we are very sensitive boys. Remember, that's Sunday, October 23rd in Portland.

Be there. Or not be there. Thank you.