#0005 - Night Slashers - 1994 - Arcade - Data East - Beat 'em Up

Seriously, this is what video games used to be about. It's hard to think of a genre that's more dead and gone than the side-scrolling beat 'em up, but in the late 1980's and early 90's they were super popular - Data East and Capcom alone must have cranked out about a hundred each for the arcades and home consoles: Final Fight, Double Dragon, Dungeons and Dragons. Later in the decade, a little studio called Treasure reached a climax of gameplay depth and innovation with Guardian Heroes for the Sega Saturn, but after that it became clear that there wasn't much wind left in the genre's sails. Versus fighters had won the arcades and 3D was starting to loom over the home market.

It's hard to really put God of War, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta in the same category. 3D changes the formula too much to retain any of the feel of the retro arcade originals, and the new focus on character progression is certainly the antithesis of the arcade philosophy. In that sense, I think it's fair to repeat that the beat 'em up is dead. Thanks to technology, however, we can say in the same breath "long live the beat 'em up".

Really the best place to get your groove on with some old-school bruising is with a MAME emulator. That's how this started for me - I was browsing around and saw that CoinOps Reignite had gotten support for Night Slashers from R4 onwards - I believe the very first emulator on Xbox to do so. I'd been waiting for the OpenBoR imitation project Night Slashers X to get ported, but after two years of waiting and with the original suddenly avaliable I couldn't say no. They're all the way up to R10 now on CoinOps (officially called X - confusing enough?) - search around on Snesorama and you should be able to find the thread.

It'd been a long time since I'd played the arcade cabinet. Years, in fact, and if I'd forgotten anything it was definitely how massive the sprites were. The game is gorgeous and the hand-drawn animations are detailed. It was those little touches and that larger-than-life scale that used to make arcade games stand out from the home consoles, and I have to say it put a smile back on my face. With my most recent experience on beat 'em ups being Streets of Rage 3, the three-character selection on Night Slashers is a little restricting but at least all the choices are fun.

You've can select a brawny American cyborg, a lightweight Japanese chick, and a middle-ground dandy-man with a good balance of speed and power. The cast of enemies is an eclectic mix of every horror trope out there: vampires, werewolves, zombies, marionnetes. Name it and it's there, with huge amounts of gore and blood in the Japanese revision or the typical "sweat" for the US and European gamers. What's funny was that I played this as a kid I thought that the white junk was intestines, guts, bile, and brain matter - making it just as awesomely gross for me and my friends as buckets of plasma.

To be honest it's hard not to become nostalgic when you play Night Slashers. It represents an approach to gamemaking that is only really replicated in the indie and arcade titles on XBLA and PSN - an approach that obviously doesn't favor story or features or depth, and really doesn't focus on gameplay too much either. I mean face it - Night Slashers is pretty simple compared to Guardian Heroes. But what it does right is just giving you a ton of action from the getgo. You can enjoy yourself without any investment (well, on an emulator at least) and without any commitment - there's no tutorial, no difficulty curve, no noobie-friendly stages. Just pedal-to-the-metal right out of the starting gate - a junk food fix in a video game format.

In a generation that is obsessed more than ever with an hour-long front end before you're really set loose inside the game world, Night Slashers is a retro beam of light that just treats you like an adult and dumps you into what matters without holding your hand. I respect that, and I wish more games today would cut the babysitting and bring the pain.

#0001 - Progear - 2001 - CPS2 - CAVE - Horizontal Shmup

For a company known almost exclusively for its ball-busting vertical shmups, CAVE sure got it right with Progear, their first horizontal shooter. The thing that strikes you instantly is the artwork - the backgrounds and enemies are a delightful steampunk tribute to Hayao Miyazaki's eternally sunny anime films, and it definitely helps Progear (プロギアの嵐, literally "Storm of Progear") stand apart from the grittier space shmups.

The premise for the action concerns the children of a small village using a renovated superplane in sorties against a power-hungry, immortal aristocrat and his goons. You choose a pilot and a gunner to specify the behavior of your plane. The different characters have unique spread and tracking properties for their weapons, and this diversity adds something to the replay value of an already charming shmup.

Another draw is the scoring system, which rewards you for switching up your tactics. Tapping the fire button is your normal shot; holding it down slows movement but gives you auto-targeting. Enemy bullets turn into jewels or rings when the enemy explodes, and switching fire modes automatically collects all the jewels/rings on screen. It makes the game a sort of fast-slow ballet of alternating fire methods. Neat.

As with most of the later CPS2 games, Progear is loaded with the little details: powerups are crates that float on parachutes to the ground, and the backgrounds are laden with stuff you'll have to play the game several times to notice. What's even more surprising (for a CAVE game) is that the difficulty for the first set of stages is actually pretty fair. I'm not anything special but I can 1cc the first half of the game with relative ease. You rarely get killed by cheap bullets and the formations are not wholly impossible to navigate for us mortals. It's just too bad that this one didn't get a home console release. As it stands, Progear is virtually unknown outside hardcore circles. It's accessible enough that it probably deserved more.

I'm playing this on my original Xbox via CoinOps Reignite, using component cables for an HD signal on my 42" Panny plasma. You didn't really think I owned the PCB board, did you? I used to run FBA-XXX Pro 1.28, but after a few weeks of I have to say that I'm very pleased with CoinOps. It supports 720p beautifully and features a bunch of slick pre-configured settings. You can download it at the ever-reliable EurAsia if you don't want to hassle with the 'usual places'.

Tell you what, something that really increases the experience is the Magic Box. With it you can use PS2, Saturn, and Dreamcast controllers on your Xbox. This is pretty sweet if you have an arcade stick for those systems. The only trick is that it's out of print and fairly hard to find. Be sure to jump on it if you ever see one for less than $30. For shmups I have the Sega Saturn HSS-0136: a Japan-only arcade stick with real microswitches instead of the usual bullshit we got in the USA. It's not as good as the HSS-0130, which was basically chopped off of an Astro City arcade cabinet. Then again, I got it MIB from Japan and it didn't cost me $150+, either.

So yeah, that's Progear. I definitely recommend it if you're into shmups, and especially if you have a soft spot in your heart for the horizontal kind. The breed has mostly died off with the rise of CAVE's own manic verts; a hori of this quality with such modern presentation is rare. Grab it for your emus if you don't already have it and get ready for walls of bullets and glorious, full-screen bosses.