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.
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