The 1CC is so daunting
Gremlin - 163,600 - 4 - MAME
Long-ass goober post below:
I've played this a couple times before and while I liked what I saw, I never really got into it - the painfully slow speed, the weird, massively delayed bomb (that you can steer?!), the bullet visibility and the difficulty (which until now I didn't understand at all) made me always shrug my shoulders. Metal Black is my favourite shootie ever, and that game feels almost like a deliberate response to it's spiritual prequel, "correcting" those flaws (although they've grown on me somewhat, and make Gun Frontier a more interesting scoring game). SOTM always forces me to sit down and take notes, and this game for better or worse needs you to take notes and play how it wants to be played to make any progress in it, and after hittin' the books I'm also goobin'
hard over it. It's just such a
cool game with a unique, cohesive setting and exudes/reeks a thick air of confidence in its stage design with incredible set pieces and interesting, certainly deliberate artistic choices.
The specific moment I fell in love was Stage 4 - after first passing over a grassy wheat field that transitions to a completely monochromatic, dusty and desolate town and after a desert littered with mechanical carcasses, the boss emerges from a (unnatural?) tornado. Unlike every other boss, there is absolutely no music playing during this encounter, only the ambience of the desert winds and the sounds of the enemy's attacks - all flamethrowers. Once defeated, instead of a giant screen-covering explosion like every other boss in the game, the winds quietly begin to tear the surface of the aircraft away until it's frame is exposed, and then it silently falls down to the desert below as its color fades away.
This all felt so calculated, and it's message finally clicked when I saw the intro again - when the story of the planet "Gloria" begins in the intro, the color transitions sepia-tone, which the entirety of Stage 4 is also sepia apart from the player and enemies. The intro then describes the "Wild Lizards" attacking their settlement, killing and enslaving the inhabitants as the image of a girl is slowly engulfed in flames as someone begs for a saviour to come. To spell it out for ya: this intro appears to clearly be referencing the setting of Stage 4 and the flames pointing a big fat finger at the boss of Stage 4, and as we fly over the level we see nothing but desertion and destruction, with no signs of life except you and the folks trying to gun you down. It could be that this was your home, an important settlement or maybe loved ones lived here, but regardless they were all gone, and you were too late. And then, the boss appears that turned the town and surrounding grassy plains into an ashy shithole, ruining the area forever. No tense, dramatic action music plays, because they've already won this particular battle. Destroying them, similairly uncelebrated - it changes nothing. All it accomplishes is making it lie in the bed it created. As the winds pull it apart it drifts down as a literal skeleton, joining the numerous "carcasses" we saw in the desert previously. Ashes to ashes etc.
That's why I now love it. Metal Black also puts the same thoughtfulness in it's structure, and that's why I also love it. Dino Rex also hilariously has the same
je ne sais quoi but the game stinks. Takatsuna Senba really did put his whole narrative pussy into these games. Hope he's doing something he enjoys cause it sounds like game dev treated him like shit.
️s
