Last December I said I thought Sega were the greatest arcade manufacturer of all time, then not a month later I was bemoaning the fact all they are making in the second decade of the 21st century are prize machines. Earlier this month, they unveiled their latest arcade machine and looking at the specs, photos and trailers, I think I may have been a bit hasty.
It's called Dream Raiders and it's a rail shooter with what Sega are calling a "motion platform", which basically means the seat moves. The controls resemble the twin-sticks of Atari's vector classic Star Wars (another rail shooter), with strange glowing domes on top. I can't decide if they're just ornamental or actually serve a purpose. The screen is a big, HD flat panel and it features a surround sound system too, both of which are pretty much par for the course these days.
Superficially, this all looks pretty ordinary, but when I read that it was inspired by the superb Christopher Nolan film Inception, I thought I should pay a little more attention. The basic premise is that each level represents a dream, which the player or players must battle their way through before choosing the next dream to tackle. As such the levels include a dragon hunt, some sort of mine cart through a volcano, a snow mobile chase (which is probably the most Inceptiony of all the levels), a battle with a sea monster, a cowboy world, an alien invasion, an asteroid belt and various other dream-like worlds.
I think Sega have been smart by offering players so much choice right out of the gate. I can see people spend a fair few quid on it, if only to try a different level/dream. The only problem now is finding one to play.
Time for another quick round-up of recently-released arcade-style games. This month we have a PC shmup from Capcom, which makes great use of lots of borrowed ideas, a remake of a classic top-down racer for PC and an utterly insane platformer from Sega.
Ether Vapor Remastered
Developer:
Edelweiss
Publisher:
Nyu Media/Capcom
Platforms:
PC
Price:
£5.45
Demo available:
Yes
What is it?
Continuing Capcom's initiative to publish small independent games, this doujin shmup borrows ideas left, right and centre, yet never fails to make good use of those ideas. The weapon system is similar to Radiant Silvergun, in that there are no power-ups, just 6 weapons assigned to 3 buttons, some of which have to be charged up to activate. The camera switches between several angles during the game, so sometimes it plays like a typical horizontal or vertical scrolling shmup and other times it plays like Sega classics Space Harrier and even Rez. It's a tight and tidy looking game, although admittedly there's not much variety in the enemy types. Nonetheless, there's a demo on Steam and any shmup fan would do worse than to download it.
Death Rally
Developer:
Remedy Entertainment
Publisher:
Remedy Entertainment
Platforms:
PC/iOS/Android
Price:
£7.99
Demo available:
No
What is it?
Max Payne and Alan Wake developer, Remedy Entertainment's original Death Rally was a top-down combat racing game, released 16 years ago for MS-DOS PCs. This remake plays much like the 1996 original, which in turn played much like Bally Midway's Spy Hunter. As the name implies, Death Rally features guns, bombs and various other weapons to help you dispose of the opposition. There's even an arena-style death match mode, which is all about destruction and not at all about racing. The remake manages to retain the feel of the original, but look a whole lot more modern at the same time. If you have a bunch of like-minded friends on-line, this is a blast.
Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit
Developer:
Arkedo
Publisher:
Sega
Platforms:
Xbox Live Arcade, PC, PS3 (via PlayStation Network)
Price:
1200MSP/£12.99
Demo available:
Yes
What is it?
Games don't get much more colourful and crazy than this rainbow-gore platformer from Arkedo and Sega. You play as the Prince of Hell, who has had the misfortune of being photographed playing in the bath with his rubber ducky — which is a very un-Prince of Hell-like thing to be caught doing. A quick look at the website where the pictures were published reveals 100 monsters have seen the picture. What can an undead lagomorph lord of the underworld do but kill every last one of them!? And so you set about exploring the incredibly detailed hell world of Hell Yeah! with the help of a jet pack-come-circular saw — yeah, you read that right. When you catch up to one of the 100 monsters, instead of a traditional boss fight, you get a 20 or 30 second-long mini-game, which invariably takes the form of quick time event. They are very fast and you have to understand the aim of these mini-games in an instant if you are to stand a chance of beating them. It keeps you on your toes in this amazingly detailed game. And much like last year's Rayman Origins, Hell Yeah! shows what 2D arcade games could have been had polygons and home consoles not taken over. Check out the demo and prepare for a visual feast.
That does it for this month. Check the Worth a Look tag in the coming months for more tasty, arcade-inspired treats.
It's Halloween this month, so I thought, why not write about a spooky boss? Coincidentally, on Friday Capcom announced that they are porting Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge and Darkstalkers 3 to home consoles. I guess that means this month's boss fight has to be Darkstalkers' own super villan, Pyron.
Darkstalkers is full of typically Halloweeny characters, from the vampire, Demitri, the mummy, Anakaris and of course the succubus, Morrigan. The final boss, Pyron, bears more in common with the balrog from Lord of the Rings, with his minotaur-like appearance and his penchant for shrouding himself in flames.
A balrog from Lord of the Rings
Pyron, as drawn by Thevilbrain
In case you don't know much about Pyron, the Capcom Database has this to say about him:
"Originally, he came to Earth 65 million years ago and created the army of Huitzil robots to destroy life on Earth. It is unknown why Pyron didn't consume Earth back then, though it is assumed to be his lust for more worthy opponents. In the UDON comic, it is explained that Pyron wanted the Earth to "ripen" before harvesting it."
As an opponent, Pyron is a tricky one. At his disposal he has huge fireballs, body-morphing drill attacks, firey spinning blades, pillars of fire and burning force fields that can trap an opponent. Oh yeah and he's ALWAYS ON FIRE!
Here he is in action on the PlayStation version of the original Darkstalkers: The Night Warrior.
Capcom's most famous beat 'em up is obviously Street Fighter, but after that my favourite is the ghoulish Darkstalkers. Ostensibly, the game plays like Street Fighter, just with vampires, demons, Frankenstein monsters and lots of other camp horror monsters, but everything so was over the top and... well, camp, that it had a charm all of its own. One thing I've always found interesting is that there are people who know of the succubus, Morrigan, but not the game that introduced her (and her cleavage) to the world. Anyway, it's been far too long coming (especially considering how many ports, remakes and sequels of Street Fighter games there have been this generation), but Capcom are finally porting Darkstalkers to home consoles. Actually, not Darkstalkers itself, but the sequel, Night Warrior: Darksider's Revenge, and Darkstalkers 3 in one downloadable bundle.
As usual for these sort of ports, Capcom are adding online multiplayer, tutorials and graphics filters to overcome the fact modern TV have twice the resolution of the original arcade machine. So until next year, here's a nice little teaser trailer from IGN:
Despite the fact my release schedule means my Classics are now published at the beginning of the month instead of the end, I wanted to do another creepy classic for Halloween. So this month I've gone for Sega's first ever "video game", Killer Shark, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. This eerie, deep sea, shark-killing light gun game did the rounds in arcades and midways for two years, when in 1974 it made a brief appearance in Spielberg's classic Jaws and Sega suddenly had a hit on their hands.
A Killer Shark cabinet, as featured about an hour into Spielberg's horror classic, Jaws
While Killer Shark was an arcade game, it was not a video game in the traditional sense. In the early 70s Sega made mechanical arcade games, so when Space War and Pong kick started the arcade video game craze, the Tokyo-based amusement manufacturer wanted in. In lieu of a graphical display Sega animated the shark using a mechanical light projection system. According to About.com:
"The secret behind the on-screen shark animation is similar to the ancient zoetrope animation wheels. A series of shark illustrations were printed onto slides and placed sequentially on a circular disk. Light was then projected onto the disk, projecting the shark slides onto a mirror. The mirror reflected the shark image onto a frosted glass cabinet screen. The space between the slides created a flickering effect similar to a film projector. When the player's eye absorbs the light from one frame just as the next appears, it created the appearance of a moving image."
The result was the shark actually had a slightly spectral appearance, which in my opinion only added to the game's atmosphere. Gameplay considered of trying to shoot the shark with the harpoon light gun. When you hit the shark the animation changed to one of the animal bleeding and thrashing about as it died. It was simple, but effect -- so effective that Sega made a follow up called Sea Devil, which was basically the same game with a manta ray. Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
With the exception of the game's brief appearance in Jaws, footage of the actual game is hard to find. What I did find was this video, which despite not being in English, does show you the how it worked.
