Chronturbo Episode 5

[ Techno music ]

Alright folks, it's Dr.Sparkle again

Geez, It seems like forever since the last episode.

Well anyways, sorry it's so late
but here we are again.

The PC Engine schedule
seems to get a bit more hectic

as we get closer to the
1989 holiday season.

Today, We're gonna finnish up July and
blast through all of August and September.

We're gonna' see a number of arcade ports today, as well as some obscure (and rather shitty) original titles.

We ended last episode with
a classic shooter, Blazing Lasers,

and we begin this episode with
a not-so-classic shooter, Side Arms

(or Side Arms: Hyper Dyne, as it's officially called in Japan)

This is the second port of a Capcom arcade game for the system
(the first being SunSun 2)

and, once again, this is published by N.E.C.,
not Capcom themselves.

However, in the U.S., this was one of the
very few TurboGrafx games not published by N.E.C.

Rather, it was by a small company called Radiance Software,
which seemed to have very close ties to Capcom.

They were also well known for their involvement in the canceled, ah, Nintendo Entertainment System California Raisins game.

The guy who ran Radiance, Christopher Riggs, actually lists himself as being a product developer at Capcom in the early 1990s.

Prior to Radiance, he apparently co-founded a company called Pacific DataWorks, with, uh, Troy Lyndon

(who was an interesting guy who much later, uh, was behind the, uh, the infamous Left Behind computer video game.

Pacific DataWorks mostly did DOS and Commodore 64 ports for Capcom (including Side Arms!).

Riggs also had a company called Riggs Interactive
which did, uh, computer ports for Capcom.

So it's no surprise that the first Radiance game is, of course, a Capcom port.

Anywho, Earth got blown up or something, and your little robot mecha dude is out there, uh, to kill lots of aliens.

Mechanics are moreorless like similar
shooters of the era (such as Gradius).

Enemies drop power-ups, speed-ups, and other types of, uh, special weapons.

Nothing too new or exciting, here, but there are a couple interesting ideas.

The main one is: you can turn around and fire in the opposite direction by hitting the second button

(making Side Arms kind of a predecessor to Forgotten Worlds).

Now, Side Arms was originally an arcade game from 1986.

Aside from the ability to fire, uh, front and back,
a big feature of Side Arms was that two players

could occasionally combine into
a single more powerful form

(with one player controlling the mech and
the other controlling his special attack weapons).

The home version dropped this 2-Player mode,

(meaning that your combined form is
basically just a temporary upgrade).

It lasts until you get hit.

The other cool feature is the ability to select your...
which weapon you wanna lose from the Start menu

(as opposed to losing your current weapon when you
pick up a new one, like in most other shooters).

You can actually carry a whole bunch of weapons at once.

Now, this is actually very helpful, since certain types of
weapons are more useful than others in some spots.

In fact, certain weapons are pretty much vital for some areas.

And this leads me to one issue that so many Shoot-em-Ups have.
If you die once, you are pretty much screwed.

Side Arms is even much worse than many other similar games.

When the action gets hectic and you
screw up and get killed,

you'll be brought back to life with, like,
a single random underpowered weapon,

generally with enemies, like,
closing in on you from all sides.

So, get killed and odds are good that you'll
get killed again within a second or two.

And there are so many damn enemies
(like missiles, et cetera) that home in on you

and follow you around, as you try to avoid them.

And when you have, like, a very basic weapon that only shoots in one direction, it's pretty difficult to pick these guys off.

Also, like Gradius, picking up too many speed power-ups will make you move, uh, too fast and be hard to control precisely.

Overall, it's actually a pretty hard game
(harder than Gradius or R-Type, in my opinion)

but it actually, uh, looks great and I liked it
better than the Genesis port of Forgotten Worlds.