Preliminary: Wow, I thought this was gonna be a quick playtest and move on, because I'm not a huge fan of shoot em ups, least of all vertical scrolling... and even less of all, WW2-themed. But I love how the bullets are so wide, the sounds and music are great, it feels approachable so far (I'm barely into it so far), already what felt like a "boss battle" which I love seeing in such an early shoot em up, and best of all, there's a Continue function! Hmmm, now is there a set ending? Oh yeah, and I liked the way it provides more stats than mere score, namely letting you know how many of the enemies you downed (I could see myself being hooked to getting as close to 100% as possible back when this was released). Oooo, and allegedly there are power-ups too?

Look: 7/10 War-related stuff is almost never a love for me. I think most the backgrounds looked nice and I liked the colors (plus, arcade graphics always stand out in this era), but I never really had a chance to dwell on the Look because the gameplay was so nonstop :-p Yeah, after typing that, I started noticing how nice the background/"ground graphics" were. And I do really like the bullet sprites. I assume the planes are all quite accurate since people identify what kinds they are, tho again that's not really my interest/thing. The hills/rice fields? in Last Stage 8 are so darn good

Edit: Bumped on further reflection a) to get this to a 4 star considering how much I reference it heh (writing this and the other edit on 4/28/23) , but also b) the colors of the backgrounds are really nice and tho nothing is sentimental, it's worthy of a solid 8 score rather than a more questionable 7 score. Military stuff will never be a favorite, but this is as good as it gets until we get to the Contra era of elaborate rugged graphics (and I wonder what I will think of those like Metroid and Contra once I'm there... which is super soon!) (And again, on 6/6/23 with Gun.Smoke, I keep referencing this game heh. This clearly made an impression in my mind. I could adjust the Look to 7 tbh, and have Attachment a 9 because of how much it comes up, but this all evens out fine I think)... Well, actually that's what I'll do to be more accurate, cuz it surely wasn't the Look that bumped this to a 4 star game heh. It was the Attachment/referencing back to it/legacy.

Sound: 8/10 Okay, some of the high pitched sound effects got annoying after a while (or was that supposed to be music lol, kinda rhythmic), but I did like a lot of the jingles, the rhythmic pulsing "music," and the overall classic arcade feel to the Sound. The best parts were the Nintendo-vibes victory sounds and other little Nintendo-y jingles along the way. Gotta love arcade games from this era :-p Ironically it wasn't until "Last Stage 7" that I fully appreciated/realized the militaristic rhythm of the "music"/sound effects. Wow the jingle for the hi score entry! And in the end, I was oddly captivated despite the annoying sounds (and my only real criticism of it was that I was nervous I was annoying Michael/others who were in earshot... at no point was I actually annoyed by the sounds). Classic overwhelming arcade vibes.

Play: 8/10 Oh shoot, turns out there is a set ending. And the game is long as heck! 32 stages, it seems? An extremely adept player took about an hour for it. Oh boy, here we go. That means probly several hours for me ha. I like that it seems to count down the stages, now that I'm onto the second stage it says Last 31 Stage heh. It's cute that the POW powerup things do something similar to the Mario games (all the enemies on the screen instantly die, I wonder if they count toward downed enemies...) Oh, sometimes it is a different power-up where 2 extra planes fly alongside you widening your bullet width, so to speak, even more! And I think you only get 3 of the flip-into-the-air somersault type things, which can be useful for last minute dodges especially later in the game, per stage. How many you have seems to be indicated in the bottom right. But since much of this game is mostly about going for a high score (just surviving feels quite lame till the later levels, if like me, your goal is just to get through all the levels), I didn't use it that much. After all, trying to get more enemies down seemed more interesting! Haha. As per usual for arcade games, the controls are super tight and well-done.

Pro-tip: of course the fly-up-and-dodge mechanic is useful too, but you can mostly dodge the boss onslaught of bullets by "sweeping" from one side to the other. It shoots the insane/un-dodgable amount toward one side, but if you start there then immediately sweep over to the other side, you should be good. If all else fails, fly up!

Feel: 8/10 This would be soooo fun on an actual arcade machine gahhh (I did get to play this on actual arcade machine too now in the further reflection edit). That must've been quite the forearm workout. And oh shoot, now I see a true boss plane, I thought some of the normal enemies had been bosses, I'll consider them sub-bosses ha. This guy's brutal... I can only imagine how hard the last few stages will be... I don't know why but the boss battles reminded me of Sonic bosses? Maybe the music, or the way it's introduced, I dunno. Oddly addicting regardless, despite not being my usual preferred genre and considering putting it down multiple times to take a break with a text adventure or something more chill, but here I am. Pushing through ha

Edit: On further reflection, this game comes up in my mind a lot. And even if it wasn't the first vertical scroller, it sure seems to be one of my main reference points (much like Manic Miner is for platformers so far). Even if it was a bit frustrating, basically bullet hell at many points, that seemed to become the norm, and accepting in run n guns and shoot em ups that I sometimes just have to dodge and not kill every enemy... I can credit this game for getting me used to that

Attachment: 9/10 Not only did I like seeing the stage number count down, but also seeing the different island names as you get closer and closer to Okinawa. What an intense concept, especially coming from Japanese creators! With Kamikazes and everything. By "Last Stage 20," I was having to abuse the heck out of savestates. And to think there were still 20 more stages to go! It becomes a bullet hell type onslaught (not that I've ever played any bullet hell, but this is how I imagine them :-p ) . I think if I just focused on surviving, not trying to down the big planes or down as many enemies as possible, it wouldn't have been necessary--but it's hard to turn off the desire to down as many as possible :-p (instead of just dodge and keep track of bullets). It, indeed, was "Last Stage 19" when I started mostly focusing on just dodging (tho still couldn't completely suppress the urge to slaughter) and started using the fly-up-and-roll-to-dodge-a-mess feature. It could be interesting to try a kill-as-few-enemies-as-possible playthrough, trying to get as low a percentage as possible. Thank goodness it has a Continue function, makes sense that it gets so insanely difficult later. Great difficulty progression, great use of Continue, one of the best shoot em ups I've played so far. Tho it seems shoot em up will never be a favorite genre, this stands out among shoot em up games. If there's one I'd return to, or help my stepdad find on an arcade machine if he gets another one etc., it'd be this one! (at least, for vertical scrollers). All that positivity being said, by "Last Stage 13" I was definitely ready to put it down. Same basic format, thumb hurting from smashing Fire so much lol, same enemies just crowded and different arrangements. I suppose shoot em ups are just not as addicting to me as platformers (which is funny cuz platformers are at least as frustrating heh, and often don't have a Continue feature). I decided I'd put it down for tonight. Maybe return to it tomorrow, maybe not. Still, a solid game. (Welp, I wound ups ticking to it to Last Stage 9, preferring a boss/checkpoint stage, and lord knows I'll be returning to it tomorrow cuz I just can't leave it unfinished like that ha. Just need a break from the nonstop action!)

4 nights later, still pushing through. Every night, my forearm and fingers sore (must have been brutal to do it all in one sitting). I felt like I was getting better each time, and I felt a marked improvement in my shoot em up abilities when I playtested Gallop (Cosmic Cop) at my family's amidst this playthrough. Technically way too long, but that's just to reach peak impress-a-bility for people who can actually do this in one sitting. For the rest of us, ends up a bit tedious at the end, but feels like PS1-and-after games where you have to do multiple sittings cuz of how lengthy it is. Well-done, if a bit long, shoot em up! Right after the boss at the end of Last Stage 2, you get this announcement (I had to pause it to screenshot it, so it's dim), I love the wording and vibe of it :-p

Epic that the actual final stage says now just "Last Stage" indeed heh. Peculiar countdown mechanic to the stage names. Also peculiar how easy the last stage was. Indeed, all the stages' difficulty varied considerably almost entirely based on whether the level had shooting enemies (besides the semi-boss big planes, they always shoot) or non-shooting enemies. The non-shoot enemies levels, of course, were considerably easier, even the Last Stage, or indeed any of the last levels that were that way. Weird how they did that. I guess on those stages you could really focus on getting high percentages. Cool that it seemed to report your overall number of enemies downed and percentage at the end, etc. Really well-done game. And wow greattttt hi score entry jingle Super cute wording for the ending too heh. Oh, early Capcom. The fact I pushed through such a long game, despite not being a preferred genre; the fact it seemed to make me a "better gamer"; and the fact I plan to show my brothers this game means it warrants an 8. When I do return to this, I could definitely see the Look and Feel boosting up, solidifying this game among my beloved. For now, moving on! That was brutal heh

Completion: Through All 32 Stages Playtime: ~3.5 hours

Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death – the seas bear only commerce – men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace.”
-General Douglas MacArthur

Recently we celebrated Veteran’s Day here in the States. Finally, something that could bring us together: honoring and remembering the brave men and women who fought for this country, many of whom paid the ultimate price so that America can enjoy its freedoms. It was a tender reprieve from much of the divisiveness of a brutal and bitter campaign, as well as the continuing aftermath.

In honor of Veteran’s Day, I’ve decided to review one of the oldest NES games: 1942. No, it wasn’t released in 1942. The vertical-scrolling shooter first appeared in arcades in 1984, 42 years after 1942. The game is historically significant for two reasons: it is based on the year 1942 which saw the US involved in World War II in response to the Pearl Harbor attack, and the game itself represents an early arcade dominance by a pre-Street Fighter Capcom.Capcom’s 19XX series which began with 1942 helped them to establish dominance in the arcades. The version I’m familiar with is the 1985 version on the NES. 1942 also reached other platforms such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Game Boy Color. As a port of an arcade game, 1942 is heavy on challenge and replayability but also heavy on tedium, and a lot of it seems to have been scaled back for the NES.

1942 is set in the Pacific theater of the Second World War, and the player takes control of the Super Ace fighter plane. The goal is to reach the end of each stage without dying, destroying enemy craft along the way, getting closer and closer to Tokyo and confronting the heart of the Imperial Japanese fleet. There are 36 stages in total.

Though 1942 doesn’t pretend to too much realism with its idea of a single fighter taking on the entire Japanese air force, the game’s few enemies are designed after actual historical war planes. The Kawasaki Ki-61 Hien, known to the Allies as “Tony”, was a mass-produced fighter with over 3,000 of them made.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.wordpress.com/2016/11/14/19...