THE 10 BEST SHMUPS ON THE MEGADRIVE
In my opinion of course.
As the title suggests, these are the ten best
Megadrive shooters money can buy (also, these are the best shooters I can
afford, as some rarer ones are super expensive - but they wouldn’t make the
list anyway! VV, Gleylancer, Sol Deace I’m looking at you and you know you suck!)
I’m not going to put these games in an order because that would be crass and
come over all definitive, which this list is not – how can it be? My preference
changes like the seasons, slowly and two times a year (global
warming innit... oohhhh! topical!)
I will endeavour however, try to make a solid case for including each one in my
list if I feel like it. Look at that! I’m all me me me.
Oh, and you’ll find no platform shooters here as I’m keeping it trad-shooter
focused, platformers would be a different list mate. Rest assured if you are a
shooter fan (shmup fan if you must…) I believe you’ll find any of these games
worthy of your time. Please keep in mind I offer no guarantees or refunds on
the following opinions, caveat emptor.
Above, the title screen of ELEMENTAL MASTER
Above a frame from the introduction of E.M.
Elemental master is an
early release on the MD, a vertically scrolling shooter with detailed but
slightly woodenly animated sprites, huge segmented smoothly moving but woodenly
animated bosses, detailed and colourful backgrounds lacking in parallax
scrolling but do include areas of woodland, and a kick ass soundtrack featuring
woodwind instruments (instrument comment not true).
It’s all very standard
fare, you unlock weapons as you defeat bosses that you can switch between on
the fly, each of these has a charge beam style attack should you need to kill
more stuff quicker. Unusually the game makes you fire up or down the screen
using a pad button per direction not the d-pad – you can’t aim diagonally at
all so that’s where the extra weapons come in.
The whole thing is rather jolly,
but feels a bit like a ‘TEAM B’ project, or just something someone had lying
around that they finished off to flog to software starved MD owners. At the
time Technosoft’s ‘TEAM B’ was better than most companies ‘TEAM A’, so it is
still pretty good. EM always has been on the expensive side to purchase from your
friendly (or unfriendly) import shop.
the title screen of BIO HAZARD BATTLE
Also known as Crying, Bio-Hazard battle actually has an improvement in PAL format – rapid fire! Apparently the Japanese version makes you tap out those bullets manually…shit that shit right off.
Anyway the game is a standard horizontal scrolling shooter, with an
interesting visual theme and story. Players have a choice of four biological
spaceship-animals, each one has access to four different weapons (pick up the coloured
orbs in game for power ups!) and comes equipped with an ‘option’ style pod
device and an R-Type style charge beam.
It’s a bit of a mixed graphical bag,
the game smooshes together hand drawn and pre-rendered art, which translates as
some great looking stages about half way through the game (with a couple of
stinkers early on) some huge bosses and larger enemies with loads of animation
frames. Sadly due to the MDs colour and cart memory limitations, the majority
of the graphics end up looking repetitive and as Patrick Moore once said 'rough as arseholes' (he never said that i made it up)
The game
itself runs very smoothly, has a 2 player mode and interesting stages (gameplay wise) to battle
through, the music is very impressive and clever, but may not be to everyone’s
taste (I really like it). PAL version is cheap-ish, the NTSC import is 3-5 times
the price.
Above - Forgotten Worlds splitting faces in half since 1988!
Above FORGOTTEN WODS title screen
Above, very am-dram.
Forgotten worlds has a special place in my heart. It’s another early MD game, reprogrammed by Sega from the Capcom original. I absolutely love the theme of the game, the weapon set and gameplay.
The MD version is very much a downgrade from the arcade in multiple ways (tiny cart memory size didn’t help) but it is still a cracking game, with some great visuals (some of those bosses are epic) and hummable tunes all the way through. I won’t have a bad word said against it, and played this endlessly back in the day. The box art is the bees-knees. Fairly cheap on all region of MD too. 6 button MD pads mess with its electronic brain for some reason (resulting in instant game over on hitting start!?) but it is awesome.
Above is the GYNOUG title screen
The majority of
Gynoug (or Wings of Wor if you like) is an absolute snooze-fest, where players,
lulled into a light sleep by crappily drawn popcorn enemies in dull attack waves, are
startled awake by some of the very best boss encounters you can find on the ‘ol
MD. First mid-level boss a case in point, it’s amazing.
The game has 2 beautiful parallax backgrounds (level 5 and 6) 2 borderline
average backgrounds (level 1 and 2) 1 below average background (level 4) and
one shite background (level 3) – luckily there is a level select cheat for
players to find.
All the sprites outside of the bosses are full on fugly, drawn in the poopiest of browns and reds - public service announcement - blood in the stool is no joke, go see a licensed butt doctor if you see any blood whilst pooping. remember the rhyme 'red stripes on toilet wipes make widows and parent-less kiddos', (and also do double check that doctors butt licence before dropping trow)
The weapons in this game however, are OTT and satisfying, with a fully powered up ‘wildfire’ being one of the
standouts in all of MD-ville. The gameplay is smooth, the music shrill. I played this game so much
as a kid I could complete it on one life, and the ending is very poor reward
indeed for the effort that that took. PAL copies are cheaper than the NTSC ones.
https://youtu.be/yHQV99S4wuc
Above the HELLFIRE title screen
Above, typical day at the office for an ace space pilot
HELLFIRE is Toaplan
taking on the tactical shooter territory of Irems R-Type. The MD version of
HELLFIRE has some improvements over the arcade version, with some nicer redesigned and better drawn sprites (albeit in fewer colours) added parallax in some
spots and extra weaponry not available in the arcade.
Its bloody hard, has
unconventional looking designs for many enemies, a very Toaplan soundtrack
(which is either to your taste or not) and interesting tactical game play. The
game is perhaps an acquired taste, but is relatively cheap and well worth
picking up. It’s much more fun than Zero Wing.
https://youtu.be/AzEpOanZVzI
The title screen of the wonderful MUSHA ALESTE
Awesome in every way,
including the price tag.
This is one of those games that if you don’t have a
past relationship with it you probably don’t see a huge amount in it. But you
weren’t there dude…not when it first came out.
We basked in its audio visual
beauty, and gripped its chunky feeling shoot-em-up action in both hands and finger pumped those buttons until it blasted every last juicy pixel explosion into our faces. We were sore but fulfilled.
its a simple game, but just very, very well done.
This game is now too expensive
for standard run of the mill work a day humans to afford, Hopefully a dying
philanthropist billionaire will leave you a copy in their will. Fingers
crossed!
(if that doesn't happen, reproduction carts are available and you can get it on the MD mini. (ahem. emulation. cough. romz. etc.))
TATSUJIN AKA TRUXTON
electrocute that boss in its pink eyes!
Toaplan released a
load of samey games on the MD, the reasons I picked this one are a few fold
1)
it was the first Shmup I bought for the MD back in the day
2) it has a space
theme, with lasers, lightning and spread guns
3) features a smart bomb that has
a giant skull in it
4) nice graphics and sound for a really old MD game.
It is
rock-balls-hard mind, and the PC engine version is arguably better. this ones
quite personal, if I tried harder I could probably come up with an objectively
better game to add to the list, but I’m not gonna. Its also getting expensive
these days on all regions.
Above THUNDER FORCE 3 title screen
lovely flamey bosses killing you!
Not released in PAL territories, i had to import this bad boy from japan back in the day, and i played it hard and long. it's a good looking game overall, some of the backgrounds are a little weak, and suffer from being very 'tunnel-y', but the bosses make up for it as they are huge and look glorious.
It has a kick ass soundtrack and that weapon set - its unmistakably a Thunder force game. nice presentation too. everyone has played this game so i don't really need to go on about it.
Its excellent, and actually not too expensive to import. better than Thunder force AC too.
Above THUNDER FORCE 4 title screen
Nice colour combos!
Takes everything that made Thunder Force 3 good, and polished it up, creating a stunning shmup, one of the very finest of the 16bit era, slightly overlong maybe but awesome none-the-less. again i don't need to go on about this one here as i discuss it elsewhere on the Blog, it's a widely well regarded classic. fairly expensive these days though.
Above the XENOCRISIS title screen
Partying, loved up and mashed off their bulbous noggins, the Aliens were no immediate threat to local law enforcement.
A game released in 2019 makes the list. Xenocrisis is really a twin stick shooter (making playing on a 3 button joypad a slight chore) but other than that its a great game.
It plays a bit like smash TV with clever procedural level layouts generated from seed values before each game. It has a theme of marines and aliens, but gets into zombie territory later on (which to be fair does let it down slightly - Zombies 'aint my bag)
Each of the levels looks great, with nicely drawn and animated sprites and some huge bosses. There's people to rescue, loads of time limited guns to pick up, and you can power up between levels by spending dog tags you pick up on new items.
Its fast paced and quite hard but the production values are great (sound is good too). if this game had been released back when the MD was 'a thing', this title would perhaps have been heralded as one of the MDs best games, certainly one of its best shooters.
Its sort of expensive, you can get a download for £15, but you can also get a boxed cart with instructions for £50, the quality of which is similar to real MD releases back in the day.
This is a great game and im super happy people are still making MD games, especially of this quality. super recommended!
so thats it. my current top 10. am i misguided? let me know below.
Comments
Post a Comment