|
THE EMULATION OF 1993
Special 10th birthday celebration
IN THE HUNT (Irem, Arcade/Saturn/Playstation/PC)
Glancing casually at the screenshot, you’re
probably already thinking “Hmf, that just looks like a lazy
ripoff of popular Neo Geo platform’n’shooting series Metal Slug.”
But that’s why Emulation Zone is writing this column and you’re not,
because Emulation Zone knows that Irem’s submarine-bound shoot-‘em-up
was released in 1993, a full three years before the
soon-to-be-seminal Neo game. But it’s not just for being first to
Metal Slug’s distinctive graphic style that In The Hunt deserves to
be remembered, because it’s a fantastic game in its own right.
Side-scrolling shooters were pretty out of
fashion by 1993, but ITH (playing a lot like a cross between the
aforementioned Slugs and Irem’s own R-Type) is a timeless classic.
From the first few seconds it’s an all-out carnival of carnage, the
stirring music all but drowned out by the cataclysmic explosion of
pretty much everything on the screen. But it’s a beautifully
balanced game, which for a change makes you work for every inch of
progress, rather than filling levels with cannon fodder as a prelude
to a ludicrously overpowered boss. There isn’t room here for even a
swift guided tour of the highlights, so just load it up and enjoy
some of the most inventive arcade action there would be for at least
the next three years.
CANNON FODDER (Sensible Software,
Amiga/Atari ST/PC/Mega Drive/SNES)
And speaking of cannon fodder, no 1993
reminiscing would be complete without giving pride of place to
Sensible’s epic arcade wargame, the game that gave birth (via Dune 2
and Command & Conquer, both strongly influenced by CF) to the entire
RTS genre. So many things about Cannon Fodder were noteworthy, not
least the game’s almost unique moral undercurrent (all your soldiers
had names, and their gravestones mounted up poignantly on a green
hill as you sent them Douglas Haig-like to their deaths), which was
ironically misunderstood by the tabloid press and the British Royal
Legion in a media storm that saw the game’s distinctive “poppy”
cover artwork (and that of magazines featuring the game) pulled at
the last minute under the threat of legal action.
But no amount of hysterical tabloid guff could
detract from Cannon Fodder’s groundbreaking, addictive-as-crack
gameplay, and the game stormed to the top of the charts and stayed
there for years. Indeed, CF and its even-better sequel still sell
decent numbers of copies today on a PC budget label, almost a decade
after their original release. And how many games can say that?
I, BALL 2 (Firebird, Spectrum)
And speaking of things that lived a long time,
Sinclair’s legendary ZX Spectrum computer was still staggering on in
1993, nine years after its debut on the home computer market. Even
at this late stage in the machine’s life, there was still room for
new original software, and I, Ball 2 – released on the Firebird
label and sold at a breathtaking £1.99 – was as good as it got.
Programmed by Timothy Closs, who went on to create the superb Kid
Gloves for the 16-bit home computers then sadly disappeared from
trace forever, IB2 was a gloriously imaginative action puzzle game
spread across dozens of single screens, which your intrepid reporter
has still never quite managed to get to the end of.
THE CHAOS ENGINE (Renegade, Amiga/Atari
ST/PC)
And speaking of intrepid adventurers foiled by
arcade puzzle action, brings us neatly to The Chaos Engine, the one
truly great game made by star programmers The Bitmap Brothers (that
wasn’t Speedball 2). A sprawling adventure in the briefly-popular
“steampunk” genre, some derided The Chaos Engine as basically
Gauntlet with knobs on, but that was to do a terrific disservice to
the level of strategy in the game. Indeed, with the diverse group of
heroes you selected your two-man team from for each game, it was
probably more akin to a 2D version of Daikatana, only 50 times
better.
GUNSTAR HEROES (Treasure, Mega Drive)
And speaking of heroes (stay tuned to see if
Emu Zone can keep this straining motif up until the end of the
feature), they don’t come much more heroic in the videogame-coding
world than Treasure, the secretive Japanese codehouse that brought
us legendary classics like Bangai-o and Radiant Silvergun. Gunstar
Heroes was the game that first made their name, though – an
extraordinary platforming shoot-‘em-up bursting at the seams with
fresh ideas and sheer gung-ho joie de vivre. Like a glorious
rollercoaster ride right through the middle of the world’s biggest
live fireworks show, only more exciting.
SAMURAI SHODOWN (SNK, Neo Geo)
And speaking of, um, Japanese things, you don’t
get much more Japanese than samurai. (He’s never going to make it. –
Ed) The Neo Geo was a machine absolutely awash in fighting games,
which makes it all the more impressive feat for Samurai Shodown to
stand as head and shoulders above the rest as it does. One of the
first ever beat-‘em-ups to star characters armed with weapons rather
than just their fists (and science-baffling fireball power, of
course), Shodown is the spiritual predecessor to Soul Calibur, and
shares that game’s instant-play accessibility combined with an
endless well of tactical depth to discover. Plus one of the
characters has a dog sidekick, which he probably sneaked in to the
fight in secret.
SECRET OF MANA (Squaresoft, SNES)
And speaking of secrets (Look! A decoy!), there
was a great big one at the heart of this legendary SNES RPG, which
many aficionados of the genre still rate above the SNES incarnation
of Zelda. The game’s groundbreaking feature was the facility to
offer three-player simultaneous adventuring, but even beyond that
gimmick it’s a superb piece of design which offers around 70 hours
of intesnse questing without having to pad it out with endless
non-interactive FMV cutscenes, unlike a certain other Square RPG
series we could mention.
CYBERMORPH (Atari, Jaguar)
And speaking of Final Fantasy, surely the
(cough) final fantasy of the once-great Atari Corporation was their
belief in the Jaguar console. Released in the “dead zone” between
the end of the 16-bit consoles and the launch of the Playstation and
Saturn, the Jag was a powerful machine almost completely bereft of
quality software, and ironically one of the few great titles it ever
saw was given away for free with the machine. Cybermorph was an
eerie, otherworldly space opera not dissimilar to a “grown-up”
version of SNES hit Starfox (also released in 1993) but was
tragically lost to posterity in the general incompetence of Atari’s
marketing department.
THUNDERHAWK (Core, Mega CD)
And speaking of sadly-wasted technological
breakthroughs, one of the biggest selling points of Sega’s ill-fated
Mega Drive add-on the Mega CD was its ability to create rotating 3D
graphics in the style of the SNES’s famous “Mode 7”. Unfortunately,
only one game ever made any real use of the feature before the
machine completed its swallow-dive down the toilet of console
history. Core’s lovely helicopter blaster – like a first-person
version of Desert Strike - deserved a much better fate.
YO! JOE! (Hudson Soft, Amiga)
And speaking of fantastic games that only four
people ever actually played, Japanese developers Hudson Soft
(creators of Bomberman, among many others) spent 1993 in an
ill-advised attempt to focus away from consoles and develop games
for home computers, which was as financially disastrous as it was
creatively excellent. Yo! Joe! is the juiciest fruit from the era, a
vast and endlessly entertaining and inventive platform romp (best
bit – lobbing Molotov cocktails at enemies and setting their
trousers on fire) that was eternally destined to be sneered at by
idiot computer nerds and never offered to its natural console-owning
audience, who would have loved it like their own child. 1993, eh?
Downloads |
