Gun.Smoke (1985)

A vertically scrolling Capcom shooter with a Western theme? Sign me the hell up and hand me my hat! For weapons and items the townspeople and other NPCs act as shops, as well as being randomly dropped by downed foes. You can also get on your horse to move around faster and it even acts as an extra life.

The music is fantastic, very hummable and never gets repetitive, a rare feat for an NES game in 1985! The game takes you through towns, valleys, forts and across Indian territory, and each level has a wanted villain at the end for you to duel, beat and collect the bounty for. I really wish I had this game as a kid, I think we would’ve loved it.

[3.5] / [5]

Preliminary (see my comment from months before when I played it on a compilation arcade machine at my local retro arcade): Welp, I finally am on this game in chronological order and tho the music is still great, and this truly is an expanded-upon and great expansion upon the 1942 spam-of-bullets-at-you formula, I just can't handle these types' nonstop onslaught of bullets. Eventually my fingers just hurt from constantly shooting and dodging as much as possible. Still, the several different ways of shooting--and the ability to combine them--is a nice touch and adds a level of skill rather than just spamming. And right when I was starting to feel like the game was just too hard and not worth pushing through, the power-ups made me get a second wind. As I'm typing this, I'm on the first boss. That was a rough first level--and there are 10 in total! Hmmm.

Welp the 2nd level had many more powerups and I got it done much quicker... I'm probly going to end up playing this whole thing argh lol. I'll never finish 1985 at this rate

Omg that boomerang boss. Yesss. Yep, definitely warrants a full review... Gah here goes nothing

Look: 7/10 Good enough, fit the concept well, not a favorite setting of mine, but they did mostly well. The Chief level is tacky, but not nearly as tacky as I expected/as the other 80s games have handled Indigenous representation so far... I guess I'm giving this a bit of a boost for the Horse animation tho :-p

Sound: 8/10 Yesss, the victory music after killing a boss. And the jingle changes as you go along which adds some nice flavor to the game. Oh and ngl, the power-up sound sounded a lot like the Resident Evil menu sound effect :-p And wow! What a great ending jingle! After so much brutality, omg I was so worn out

Play: 8/10 Like always, I love that you can shoot away [certain?] projectiles such as the boomerangs. Gotta love that feature, makes close calls a lot more enjoyable than just "welp, you're dead." I love the power-ups in general, especially that horse one cool! But all of them tbh. And that you can get more and more of them. As to be expected with an arcade game, the controls were tight and much like 1942, allowed for super close calls and dodges and last-minute-shoot-the-projectiles that helped me push through. Very precise collision masks, which is critical for this too. Like other vertical shoot em ups, at a point it just becomes complete bullet hell and more about dodging than killing (tho I try to do that too lol), so it's critical to have tight controls and collision masks for those last second dodges. The mix-and-match shooting controls did come in handy, quite darn often, (your bullets' collision masks are also very tight so keep that in mind, just hitting in the vicinity will not work, and if a boss is starting to dodge, that shot wont count either... overall this concept allowed for some more interesting boss mechanics than the usual with flight-based shoot em ups where they just take more damage, or have a shield, or shoot more constantly etc... the addition of dodge features added a lot tbh) and did seem well-done (I was skeptical of 3 shoot buttons at first). It is a good solution to the dilemma of dual-joystick shooters control, while keeping the Western theme of your 2 guns being pointed in certain ways. I bet those controls would be really awesome on an original machine, I truly hope I get a chance to play this on an original machine someday, but it translated surprisingly well to the PS4 gamepad as well (not so well to the compilation machine I originally tried this on at the local arcade).

Pro-tip: the horned skull power-up thing is not, in fact, a power-up. And will de-power-up you lol

Feel: 8/10 Still reminds me of 1942, this era of vertical scrollers with set endings where it's such an insane amount of enemies is interesting. I find them as addictive as action-adventures and platformers where I feel I need to finish them.

Attachment: 8/10 Uff that round with Wolf Chief, I think it's Round 6. Really making me question whether I can push through this (but that happened in 1942 etc too, they just increase to such an insane amount of enemies it becomes simply about dodging and spamming shots at a point heh..)

Welp, like I said with 1942, I can truly say this made me a better gamer. Even if I didn't love every moment of it, I kept pushing through. I never considered shoot em ups a "have to finish" genre of games, even with set endings, but apparently they have become that. That Round 8 boss was literally nonstop shooting at me, like with the later parts of 1942... I can only imagine this next boss on Round 9 with a Machine Gun lol. But like even with my utmost favorite genres of action-adventures and platformers (odd I don't put RPG at the top of that list anymore... probly cuz the era of console RPGs hasn't really come yet), while I always feel the pressure to finish it even when the game isn't perfect, it often requires a special Look, Sound, or concept/Feel to make that happen. So I gotta give credit to the game's unique concept (as far as vertical shoot em ups are concerned), power-up system with its UI, and most of all, the Sound. Without those factors, I don't know if this would have been a push-through. I damn near gave up in Round 6/7, but at this point, I might as well push through (I'm on Round 9 as I type this heh)

And at last! (mind you, this was with copious use of savestates for the last 3 Rounds lol, and at the beginning of Rounds during the mid game too)

Completion: Through All 10 Rounds, Score 712,450 Playtime: ~2 hours

Despite age and apparance Gun.Smoke is very decent arcade multidirectional vertical shooter. Everything about it is really well made and designed. There are two versions of this game I am aware of. A NES port (which like in the same ways commando is a somewhat altered and different interpretation) and the arcade. I played this through the PSX Capcom Generations 4. I played this sideways in TATE mode.

This is a game I never had even heard of. It's a very old capcom vertical shooter, similiar to a twin stick shooter. The magic of this game is in it's control scheme that (in the original version) allow you to mix and match buttons to angle your shots from left, center, right. You also have two guns so it feels pretty cool. That kind of control scheme is a bit unique for most games in the era, where you simply get shooty, in Gun.Smoke it is still very shooty but there is a a lot of satisfaction in shot placement that make the game pretty enjoyable. You feel like a genuine gunslinger from it.

In the PSX version, the 3 button 'mix and match' is replaced with predefined shots. This makes things easier and I would say would have to be an improvement.

The enemies are well thought out and have behaviors and modes of engagement that make playign this game more methodical and strategy like than you typically see as well. The music is dated and nothing special but its on point. The difficulty in this game spikes drastically, dodging bullets becomes an orchestral movement.

I realize as time goes on hardly anyone will have an interest in stuff like this but if you get a chance to play it you should. It's an exceptional game from a long gone era. It was also my introduction to TATE mode (a vertical orientation) and i found it quite helpful to spot the little bullets whizzing past me since they are going from the top of the screen to the bottom.