|
AFFORDABLE FIREPOWER
PC shoot-‘em-ups are rubbish. It’s hardly a
surprise, since there’s no market for them – the PC doesn’t have
many arcade fans, and the games hardly ever have any punctuation in
the titles, so they’d never sell. The rest of PCZ rather enjoys Star
Monkey by Small Rockets, but Emu Zone thinks it’s crap, and can
offer no greater demonstration in support of this view than Giga
Wing.
A 1999 Capcom coin-op also converted to the
Dreamcast, Giga Wing doesn’t look like all that much (it runs on
CPS2 hardware, which is over seven years old now), but it’s one of
the most important games in shoot-‘em-up (or “shmups”, as they’re
known to aficionados) history. Shmups in the late 90s had become
suffocated by the never-ending growth of powerups, to the extent
where most games were ruined by a crippling imbalance between your
powered-up ship and the normal one (ie, get killed once and your
game was over, because without your accumulated powerups you had no
chance).
With the invention of the “Reflect Force” (an
unlimited-use recharging shield that bounced your enemies’ shots
straight back at them, a variation of which has appeared in almost
every shooter since), Giga Wing was able to restore that balance,
creating a brutally hard but totally fair game which could flood the
screen with hundreds of bullets yet always leave a skilled player a
way through, even with the basic unpowered ship. It’s a glorious game, and the encryption was recently cracked to enable it to be played in the excellent multi-game emulator Nebula, so for the sake of a 12MB ROM download you don’t have to take Emu Zone’s word
for it.
If you enjoy Giga Wing, Emulation Zone strongly
recommends that you pop out and get the Dreamcast version, which
sells for £4.99 or less nationwide. (And if you haven’t got a
Dreamcast, the going rate for one of those is around 20 quid, so
it’s still a lot cheaper than buying a single poor-quality PC
shooter.) Not just for the “moral” reasons, but because the DC
version is actually a substantially superior game, largely due to
the addition of the all-important Score Attack mode, the game mode
of champions. Use Nebula’s Giga Wing as a sort of playable demo, and
prove that emulation actually generates money for the idiot software
industry. The industry might not thank you for it, but your trigger
finger, at least, will love you forever.
Downloads |
