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[ Techno music ]
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Alright folks, it's Dr.Sparkle again
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Geez, It seems like forever since the last episode.
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Well anyways, sorry it's so late
but here we are again.
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The PC Engine schedule
seems to get a bit more hectic
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as we get closer to the
1989 holiday season.
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Today, We're gonna finnish up July and
blast through all of August and September.
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We're gonna' see a number of arcade ports today, as well as some obscure (and rather shitty) original titles.
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We ended last episode with
a classic shooter, Blazing Lasers,
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and we begin this episode with
a not-so-classic shooter, Side Arms
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(or Side Arms: Hyper Dyne, as it's officially called in Japan)
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This is the second port of a Capcom arcade game for the system
(the first being SunSun 2)
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and, once again, this is published by N.E.C.,
not Capcom themselves.
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However, in the U.S., this was one of the
very few TurboGrafx games not published by N.E.C.
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Rather, it was by a small company called Radiance Software,
which seemed to have very close ties to Capcom.
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They were also well known for their involvement in the canceled, ah, Nintendo Entertainment System California Raisins game.
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The guy who ran Radiance, Christopher Riggs, actually lists himself as being a product developer at Capcom in the early 1990s.
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Prior to Radiance, he apparently co-founded a company called Pacific DataWorks, with, uh, Troy Lyndon
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(who was an interesting guy who much later, uh, was behind the, uh, the infamous Left Behind computer video game.
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Pacific DataWorks mostly did DOS and Commodore 64 ports for Capcom (including Side Arms!).
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Riggs also had a company called Riggs Interactive
which did, uh, computer ports for Capcom.
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So it's no surprise that the first Radiance game is, of course, a Capcom port.
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Anywho, Earth got blown up or something, and your little robot mecha dude is out there, uh, to kill lots of aliens.
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Mechanics are moreorless like similar
shooters of the era (such as Gradius).
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Enemies drop power-ups, speed-ups, and other types of, uh, special weapons.
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Nothing too new or exciting, here, but there are a couple interesting ideas.
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The main one is: you can turn around and fire in the opposite direction by hitting the second button
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(making Side Arms kind of a predecessor to Forgotten Worlds).
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Now, Side Arms was originally an arcade game from 1986.
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Aside from the ability to fire, uh, front and back,
a big feature of Side Arms was that two players
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could occasionally combine into
a single more powerful form
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(with one player controlling the mech and
the other controlling his special attack weapons).
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The home version dropped this 2-Player mode,
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(meaning that your combined form is
basically just a temporary upgrade).
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It lasts until you get hit.
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The other cool feature is the ability to select your...
which weapon you wanna lose from the Start menu
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(as opposed to losing your current weapon when you
pick up a new one, like in most other shooters).
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You can actually carry a whole bunch of weapons at once.
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Now, this is actually very helpful, since certain types of
weapons are more useful than others in some spots.
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In fact, certain weapons are pretty much vital for some areas.
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And this leads me to one issue that so many Shoot-em-Ups have.
If you die once, you are pretty much screwed.
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Side Arms is even much worse than many other similar games.
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When the action gets hectic and you
screw up and get killed,
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you'll be brought back to life with, like,
a single random underpowered weapon,
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generally with enemies, like,
closing in on you from all sides.
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So, get killed and odds are good that you'll
get killed again within a second or two.
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And there are so many damn enemies
(like missiles, et cetera) that home in on you
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and follow you around, as you try to avoid them.
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And when you have, like, a very basic weapon that only shoots in one direction, it's pretty difficult to pick these guys off.
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Also, like Gradius, picking up too many speed power-ups will make you move, uh, too fast and be hard to control precisely.
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Overall, it's actually a pretty hard game
(harder than Gradius or R-Type, in my opinion)
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but it actually, uh, looks great and I liked it
better than the Genesis port of Forgotten Worlds.