1942 [Arcade]

Thinking about 1942, it’s a game that is front and center in my mind when someone brings up Capcom. It’s also one that I instantly associate with going to arcades during the 1980s. As such, I instantly date myself when it comes to the game because most people conjure up images of Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, or maybe Street Fighter when the name “Capcom” is uttered these days. Not to mention, arcades are a relic of the past for many, something that people increasingly only know about because of stories from their parents.

As a kid growing up, most of the arcades that I went to had a 1942 cabinet in them. I didn’t even have to look for the thing, it’s music could be heard the second one entered the place with its very simplistic mix of snare drums and what sounded like a whistle, belting out a very military themed tune. Well, perhaps “belting out” is going a little bit far, as the technology was still limited at the time insofar as generating music goes circa 1984. There’s an old interview with the game’s composer, Ayako Mori, floating around where she mentions how limited technology’s ability was to make music for games in the early 80s. I certainly agree that it was still the age of basic bleeps and bloops, but what she did with 1942 still made for a very memorable tune.

Another thing I’ll never forget about the game is the sheer number of quarters that I’ve pumped into it over the years. Of course, this was in part because I really like it. However, it’s also in part because I never got terribly good at the game. It was the 80s after all and arcade games were designed to devour those things back then. Eventually, I got to the point where I’d be quite pleased with myself if I managed to survive until a level with a decent amount of land passing beneath my P-38, which was no mean feat in its own right. Getting further than that never really materialized, but there is a part of me that would actually like to finish the game with one credit some time before I die.

While playing the game, it’s easy to see that the developers were experimenting with how they wanted to approach the genre to some extent. First of all, quite a lot of enemies are thrown at the player. By the second or third level, bullets are all over the place while your airplane is being swarmed by smaller planes. It’s usually around this point that one or two big planes will fly on-screen, tempting players to shoot them down for big points amidst the maelstrom swirling around them.

Second, there are some nice little touches to 1942. On a basic, aesthetic level it’s nice to see the P-38 slowly tilt as if a player moves it to the far left or right of the screen. It sounds like a trivial thing nowadays, but one rarely saw this sort of thing back in the 80s, as planes and ships often stayed flat as they flew around the screen in shoot ‘em ups during this time.

On a more practical level, players were given the option to “roll” with their plane a limited number of times. This allowed the plane to do a loop whereby it could avoid being hit by a bullet or prevent a collision with an enemy plane. As the genre evolved, developers looked for more and more uses for buttons on the arcade machine. There were games like Dragon Spirit and Xevious that had one button for air attacks and another for ground attacks. In later years, it became very common to have one button for normal attacks and another for bombs. 1942, however, was a unique case with its rolls as an alternate ability to firing off the plane’s main guns.

As the years wore on, and the game grew in popularity, 1942 inevitably made its way to various home consoles including the NES, MSX, and PC-88. Decades later, it showed up on a number of classic compilations from Capcom. For me, though, its original arcade incarnation will always be my favorite. Sure, it gobbled up my quarters at a blistering pace, but the game is so intertwined with my early arcade-going experiences and the good times that I had in those places that I’ll always have fond memories of that version of the game.

Capcom’s D&D Beat ‘Em Ups

During high school, there were a couple of genres that I liked to spend a lot of time with: RPGs and beat ‘em ups. They’re certainly on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what they have players doing. One tends to be of a slower pace, building up character stats, and having a good think about how to defeat particularly tough enemies, all while exploring a big, mysterious world. The other is all about running around punching hordes of enemies in the face, often in co-op mode so friends can come and help.

I spent much of the early 90s gorging myself on the likes of Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior (it was still called that in the West at the time), Phantasy Star, Golden Axe, Final Fight, Streets of Rage and a host of others. There were good times to be had in all of them, but they were distinctly different experiences that very rarely crossed paths. Then something unexpected happened. Capcom released The Tower of Doom in arcades.

The first time I saw this, my jaw dropped for so many different reasons. For one, it was a new Capcom beat ‘em up, which was always a cause for celebration, as they were one of the kings of the genre during the height of its popularity. This is the company that brought us games like Final Fight, Captain Commando, and Knights of the Round. They had developed a reputation among arcade-goers for being pretty darn good at making these sort of games.

Second, the game had the Dungeons and Dragons license, which opened the door to a number of possibilities. Most obviously, there was the attempt to implement some degree of RPG elements. Capcom did give this a try a couple of years earlier with King of Dragons and arguably to a lesser extent on Knights of the Round, although these were a rudimentary first kick of the can at meshing the two genres together. Characters leveled up and got new equipment as players got further into the games. It wasn’t huge, but did give a basic sense of progress and character growth.

Tower of Doom built upon this, continuing with characters gaining levels while dressing the experiences in all of the livery one would expect from a game dawning the D&D mantle. The most notable feature was a basic inventory system. In other beat ‘em ups, players could temporarily arm their characters with knives, pipes, and the like when they stumbled upon them after breaking open a crate or disarming an enemy. However, the weapon had to be used right away and would be lost after a time.

In Tower of Doom, weapons could still be found in treasure chests or whatever but they would then be placed in the character’s inventory. This allowed players to save what they found for later to use in clutch situations. There were also quite a few different goodies that could be set aside including daggers, bottles of burning oil, arrows, war hammers, and a variety of different magical rings.

Characters only had six inventory slots, though, so they did have to make choices as to what they wanted to carry with them. It wasn’t possible to horde everything that they stumbled across. This was done by item type, however, so item stacking was possible. It was just a question of whether it was more beneficial to continue on with six daggers or a ring of magic missile, for example. Given that all of the game’s characters were armed with swords, maces, and the like, these items were limited to projectile weapons, as it would have been silly to give a dwarf a plank with a nail it it when he already had a perfectly good axe.

It may not sound like much, but having an inventory system like this could have a palpable impact on how one approached the game, especially with three or four people playing. With that many people working together, it was possible for someone to pretty much tank enemies as, say, a warrior or dwarf while someone else played the elf, hung back, and hurled projectiles at the mob of baddies that was distracted. Of course, this all hinged on people working together, which in turn meant dragging one’s friends with them to the arcade to play this way. The alternative was playing with strangers and having that one jerk priest that took all of the gold and items for himself, then complained that no one was shooting arrows at a boss. You took them all, you twit. 😡

Greedy priests aside, multiplayer was one of the best things about Tower of Doom. The game supported up to four players at once and, coincidentally enough, featured four different characters to play as. There was a dwarf, a priest, a warrior, and an elf. They didn’t have names, but filled the main archetypal roles in an RPG. The characters look quite nice with a noticeable anime-like flair to them. I’ve always been fond of the elf in no small part thanks to her resemblance to Deedlit from Record of Lodoss War.

While the game’s roster of characters was fairly large and varied, their moveset wasn’t, unfortunately. There were dash attacks to be dished out and another move that required incredibly precise timing to execute. After that, players were limited to marching around the screen, bonking baddies over the head in the traditional manner. Having that fancy inventory system helped to distract from this, but given that other games in the genre were already experimenting with implementing all sorts of fancy moves (especially in the wake of Street Fighter II), this particular void was hard to completely overlook.

One other RPG element to make its way into Tower of Doom was its surprisingly fleshed out story and how players could impact it. Usually beat ‘em ups just told players to stop some rival street gang, save the president, or something equally banal, but here was a game that sent players on quite the grand adventure. About the only other game in the genre that I can think of off the top of my head which attempted anything remotely similar was Konami’s Gaiapolis. Even then, good luck finding an arcade that had the machine. If someone wanted a beat ‘em up with anything even remotely approaching robust narrative, Tower of Doom was the way to go.

Making its story all the more interesting, and adding an element of replay value at the same time, was that at the end of each level players were presented with a choice as to what they should do next. It wasn’t a huge choice, being limited to two options, but it was more than most other games offered outside of one racing Ferraris across America or waging intergalactic war against vast armadas of mechanical sea life. Even if players beat Tower of Doom, they could still come back to the game and try going down a different path for their next play through.

Tower of Doom did so well that it got a sequel a few years later, Shadows of Mystara, and it improved upon every aspect of the first game.

There were two new characters added to the roster, bringing the total to six. First there was a thief. She was very fast, but couldn’t wear armor or use a shield, making her quite squishy. She could, however, pick enemies’ pockets, which was kinda neat. The other new addition was a mage. He was squishy too, but lugged around a bunch of snazzy magical items, allowing him to pew-pew from a safe distance for a while.

A lot of other stuff that made the previous game great were back in Mystara, such as branching progression paths, amazing graphics, the selection of D&D monsters to fight and so forth. One area that got a big improvement, though, was characters’ movesets. Each of them had more attacks up their sleeve now. There were special moves that depleted one’s health bar, another attack that was performed the same as if you were doing a fireball in Street Fighter II (no health consumed here), and one more that was done by pressing down, then up, followed by the A button (again without consuming health). With this, players had a ton of attacks at their disposal, really elevating the combat in Mystara compared to what we saw in Tower of Doom.

Eventually, both games even got ported to the Sega Saturn. Unfortunately, it was only released in Japan. So, anyone who really wanted to play either of those had to import them. As the years passed, the games’ price climbed and climbed making it prohibitively expensive for a lot of folks to get. A couple of years ago, though, Capcom inexplicably re-released both of them digitally for consoles and PC putting smiles on many people’s faces.

That’s how I play the games now, having grabbed them off Steam (as you can probably guess by the screenshots). They’ve been modernized somewhat with a few graphic filters to choose from that impact the look of the game while playing, a nice online multiplayer mode (unfortunately it’s a bit hit or miss trying finding randoms to play with), and a bunch of achievements to strive for if you’re so inclined.

Those are all nice little additions, but ultimately I’m just happy to playing these games again. Capcom was one of the greats when it comes to the arcade beat ‘em up. Their games handled well, looked great, and gobbled up more quarters than I’d care to admit. As far as their pantheon of titles in the genre go, Tower of Doom and Shadows of Mystara are two of my favorites, and games I’ll happily revisit for years to come.

[Note: Shmuplations.com has translated a bunch of old interviews with the developers of these games. They have some really interesting nuggets in them and are well worth a read. If you’re interested, you can check them out here, here, and here.]

[Another Note: I do the Twitter thing, so if for some odd reason you want to read much shorter ramblings of mine, follow me there!]

Crystalis / God Slayer [NES / Famicom]

As much as SNK has made a name for itself with the Neo Geo as well as series such as King of Fighters and Metal Slug, it can be a lot of fun to sift through their various early efforts. There was a time when the company was perfectly happy to make games for other systems, with the Famicom / NES getting a number of SNK titles.

One such game was Crystalis (1990). At face value, it may be tempting to simply look at the game as a Zelda clone. However, while it shares a number of core gameplay elements, its developers brought a number of their own ideas to the table. This resulted in a combination of execution and originality that helped the game become a cult classic among action RPG fans.

When it first came out in Japan, the game was actually called God Slayer: Sonata of the Far Away Skies. So, in order to avoid offending religious groups in the US, the game got a new name for Western markets, being christened Crystalis instead.

Given the story in the game, God Slayer actually seems appropriate. Everything takes place after much of the world was destroyed during a massive conflict. After the dust settled, survivors rebuilt. Many made simple settlements, but one group who retained much of the knowledge before everything was destroyed built a large, floating tower. In time, this group were all but forgotten, remembered only in legend and thought of as gods. The player takes control of someone who has been in stasis since before the world was destroyed, and who must eventually fight a newly formed empire that is searching for the tower to use themselves. The whole thing almost has a sense of Gnosticism to it.

As was mentioned earlier, the Crystalis does have a similar feel to The Legend of Zelda. Your character runs around the map, swinging his sword, exploring dungeons, finding special items, and slaying legions of monsters. However, there are a number of little touches that help the game to stand out from other such games of this sort.

First off, your character can charge his sword to launch a projectile energy attack. Players did this by holding down the attack button, allowing the charge to build, then releasing after to launch the energy attack. As one progressed through, they would slowly unlock items that allow for up to three power levels when using the attack. This would result in a little more strategy when fighting, especially taking into account that while the third tier of the attack was it’s most powerful, it also consumed mana, a very precious resource in the game. As such, it made more sense to usually only let a charge his level two, then firing so to get off a reasonably powerful attack without running out of mana.

While similar mechanics are often associated with the Zelda series, it’s interesting to note that Crystalis was the first game to experiment with it. Similar abilities wouldn’t make their way to Nintendo’s legendary series until later.

There were some other neat features in the game as well, such as magic. Over the course of the game, players would discover all sorts of spells. Some would be pretty straightforward, like the ability to heal, but then the game would throw some curve balls like one spell that allowed your character to disguise himself in order to get past certain obstacles, and another that allowed psychic communication with the world’s four sages, who would give nuggets of advice. This spell could prove surprisingly helpful when one gets stuck and doesn’t know what to do next.

On top of this, there is the usual adventuring: clobbering enemies, gathering gold, exploring dungeons, and fighting bosses. While doing this, one is quickly reminded that Crystalis is still a product of the NES era, as it can be quite challenging. Expect to die fairly often in this game, but also expect it to be a fair death. There’s a method to the various monsters’ madness. If you learn the baddies’ patterns, everything in the game is beatable. There is one difficulty spike later in the game when fighting a particular boss in the mountains (and I’m sure most who have played the game can relate to this), but on the whole the game is tough but fair.

When the tough gets going, grinding generally isn’t the answer. Players can get away with it early on, but your character can’t go higher than level 16. It’s a mechanic similar to what one will find in Ys. So, later in the game if someone is having trouble with a particular boss or group of enemies, there’s little choice but to hunker down and figure out a strategy to defeat them. Wandering off to grind on relatively easy baddies just isn’t an option. The only time players will find themselves grinding is when they need gold for new gear, and even then this isn’t really necessary often since the stuff is pretty easy to get in the game.

Navigating the dungeons takes some doing as well. These things were long, winding affairs with all manner of forks in the road, dead ends, and blocked paths that would need to be revisited later. The further one gets into the game, the more grandiose, not to mention daunting, these places becomes. Item inventory is very limited in Crystalis, to it’s important not to get hit by monsters very often in order to conserve healing herbs for later.

Ultimately, Crystalis is an interesting evolution of the action RPG. The genre was still in its infancy circa 1990 with games like Ys, Xanadu, and, of course, Zelda helping to shape it. Here we have SNK contributing to it, albeit it briefly. The company may have gone in a very different direction since then, but Crystalis will remain one of the more interesting action RPGs to release for the NES.

Note: Crystalis actually got a port to the Gameboy Color. Gameplay is actually quite similar to its NES counterpart, but the story has been heavily retooled for the worse. It’s still a fun game, but don’t pay too much attention to the story.

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