8 May - 194X, Alantia, iOS Shooters, Gunman's Proof, Wing of Madoola, DogDay, Chuck Ernst Metal Gear interview, Game Club 199X

Our big feature this week is an epic look through the entire 194X series from Capcom, so that’s 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 and 19XX, plus all the variants and offshoots for all the machines. If you like vertical shooters, then you’ve no doubt played at least one of them. In addition to this we also have part 8 of our iOS Shooter Coverage, examining Buster Red, Shoot the Magic, Lightning Fighter and Ultrablast. Our triple-whammy of blasting action finished off with Alantia, an unusual and very difficult anime-inspired Space Harrier clone for the PC-88.


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If you want cute and RPG-like, we’ve got you covered with Gunple: GUNMAN’S PROOF, a fantastic but overlooked gem from Japan that now has a fan-translation. Imagine Zelda: A Link to the Past, except set in the wild west, with guns instead of swords, an adorable horse to gallop around on, plus space aliens and a focus on high-scoring. Yes, it’s that kind of awesome. There’s also a look at The Wing of Madoola, an interesting and rather obscure Famicom platformer from Sunsoft. It’s not their best title, but it spawned a number of cameo appearances, merchandising tie-ins, plus a few doujin games too. It also fills our mandatory ladies-in-metallic-bikinis quota for the week.

For our regulars there’s another Metal Gear interview, this time with Chuck Ernst, who developed the IMB port of the original NES game. He reveals some really cool trivia about Konami America, gives a definitive answer about the legendary unreleased version of Metal Gear for the Amiga, and we speak about the cancelled Akira game. In a change from our usual Your Weekly Kusoge format we’ve got an extended feature on DogDay, a curious CG-based adventure from an Australian developer which ended up released in Japan. It had a lot of potential, which was wasted with poor design, the arbitrary need to play crappy minigames to proceed, plus some truly awful puzzles.

Our spotlight of the week is Night Trap. Gamasutra recently ran a detailed feature on its development, which we link to, and we’ve also got a PDF of the Making Of article that was featured in Retro Gamer issue 63. This was made available on the original author’s website, so we have no qualms spreading it around further.

Finally, the sixth episode of Game Club 199x has been posted. For May 2012, Snarboo, Sotenga and AceWhatever discuss Landstalker, Sega/Climax's isometric Zelda-style action-RPG for the Genesis.