So far Namco has been losing pretty badly and they needed to
step it up to keep up with Midway’s constant technological innovations. Good thing then that in 1987 they did just
that. I’m not sure exactly what kind of
arcade hardware Midway was using, but 1987 marked the debut of the Namco System
1, an upgraded arcade machine capable of better sound and graphics, not unlike
what the CPS-1 was for Capcom. Midway’s
arcade offering so far have left me in awe with their presentation, but new
dedicated hardware might be the boost Namco needs to start racking up more
wins. Let’s see if they can get out of
their losing streak.
Spy Hunter 2(MID): The first Spy Hunter had its fun factor
crippled in large part due to its top down perspective limiting the view of
what’s ahead so the sequel corrects that in a big way by making it a Pole
Position style pseudo-3D game instead.
This makes the vehicular combat much easier and visually
impressive. The new gear shift adds some
further depth with getting the car in position to gun down enemies and the
steering is nice and tight so turns aren’t as hard to handle as in other games
of its type.
The only frustrating part is that the car seems to be made
of tin foil. I know it’s not an armored
vehicle, but hitting one car the wrong way or one very precisely-placed stick
of dynamite from a helicopter ends the fun in an instant with little room for
error. Spy Hunter 2 is a great game to
pick up and play for a few minutes though.
Dragon Spirit(NAM): Namco came in hard with their
new hardware because this is exactly what I like to see. Fast and frantic rapid-fire action, beautiful
visuals, great music, big bosses and level design that never repeats itself. The music is so good there’s a tribute track
dedicated to it in Namco’s Taiko no Tatsujin games. Dragon Spirit is up there with the best
old-school shooters, but there’s one problem: no continues.
Once all your lives are lost in Dragon Spirit, you don’t get
to continue from where you died. It’s a
challenging game and clocks in at over half an hour to finish so the odds of
beating it in one go are slim to none, echoing my problem with Rolling Thunder. If you can tolerate that, are very confident
in your shoot-em-up skills or are playing a version that allows for level select
or continues, Dragon Spirit is great.
APB(MID): Another Midway game with a creative premise. It’s a driving game in which you use a police
car and its siren to pull over, ticket and ram various criminals on the road to
meet a quota. It starts off with a
training course, but slowly introduces new criminal types and ways to deal with
them.
APB is held back by how the siren works. Functionally it’s like a form of shooting and
there’s a crosshair, the distance of which is determined by how fast you go. There’s no manual means of aiming so it’s
easy to overshoot or undershoot the vehicle you’re trying to use it on. The most reliable way to use it is rear
ending people just to make sure the siren works on them, which is a bad idea
because there’s a time limit and you need to stop by gas stations and donut
stores to refuel. Why couldn’t the
siren’s effect just be a straight line instead of one specific point?
That aiming quirk can be annoying, but I can’t accuse APB of
being stale and there’s a level select right from the start, in case you wanted
to continue off from where you were previously or want to skip a level. The expressive cartoon artwork and voice
lines from people on the road bring it all together to make APB especially
enjoyable.
Xenophobe(MID): The name Xenophobe is not a reference to
Trump voters, but rather a fear of the lawyer-friendly aliens called Xenos,
which are totally not Xenomorphs. Also
totally unlike Alien, the goal is to try to clear out aliens or escape before
the self-destruct sequence is initiated to kill a space station overrun with
them. As the game goes on, the Xenos
evolve and take on new forms.
The level design is nothing but hallways of aliens and
combat is boring and basic. Since the
game is centered around going through rooms and fighting aliens, those are
pretty big failings to have. At least it
was a neat idea.
Pac-Mania(NAM):
What better way to show off new hardware than bringing back the company mascot
with a new facelift? Pac-Mania brings
Pac-Man back in an isometric pseudo-3D look with a pumping soundtrack and more variety
in the mazes.
The gameplay doesn’t stray from the classic Pac-Man formula,
but the changes it does make are significant enough to put a new spin on
it. The game only shows part of the maze
around Pac-Man and not the entire map on one screen, but it’s still zoomed out
enough that it never feels like you’re playing blind and I think the ghosts now
have AI that looks for you instead of knowing exactly where you are, meaning
you can maneuver around their line of sight like Pac-Man is the caveman
ancestor of Solid Snake.
The other big change is the ability to jump. Simply adding a jump button to a maze game
may not seem like much, but maneuvering a jump to the right place and making
sure to jump in such a way that you don’t hit any ghosts requires forward
thinking and precision. Jumping to
bypass ghosts can be used for getting them where you want them to go, adding a
surprising layer of depth to the gameplay, if you’re inclined to utilize it
that way. All that with the appealing
visuals and music makes Pac-Mania the best Pac-Man game after the original and
is well worth a play.
Xybots(MID): Remember how I said Midway’s games left me in
awe? This is another one. Xybots
perfectly simulates a 3D shooter, consistently scaling sprites and smoothly
changing angles so that the illusion of 3D is never broken, facilitating a
dungeon crawler in which maps are divided by squares and players go through
them while shooting various robots.
The character is always aiming ahead, but can move in 8
directions and with two buttons the camera is rotated left or right. Even in big empty rooms the camera scrolling
is unbroken and never disorienting, which is very unlike other 3D dungeon
crawlers of its time. Although the
floors and walls are simple squares, and pressing buttons to turn is
antiquated, it plays about as well as a modern 3D third person shooter does. It even has 2 player split screen co-op and a
shop between levels where you can use what you’ve gathered for power-ups, just
like many roguelikes today.
The biggest problem Xybots could have had in its limited
camera view is rendered moot by the detailed mini map. Each level’s map shows enemies, power-ups,
exits and the direction your character is facing in real time so you’ll never
get blindsided as long as you pay attention.
You can wait for an enemy to turn a corner, shoot enemies down from
several squares away and take cover behind walls and objects, all things that,
for a 3D style shooter, were practically foreign concepts long before Doom came
out. Xybots is unlike anything I’ve ever
seen for the arcades at this point in time and it’s my 1987 game of the year.
Galaga ‘88(NAM): I know the title has ‘”88” in it, and the
Switch’s Namco Museum says it was released that year, but both Wikipedia and
the Namco Museum: Virtual Arcade say Galaga ‘88 was released right at the tail
end of 1987, so I guess Namco undershot it a little bit with that title and
want people to forget.
Not stopping with Pac-Man, Namco also made a new Galaga with
their hardware upgrade and it’s a huge improvement over the original. Like Pac-Mania, it doesn’t stray far from the
formula of shooting alien ships by moving left and right, but it adds a layer
of polish to everything. The enemies are
more detailed and look prettier when they explode, there’s real music, far more
enemy variety, plenty of backgrounds and even honest-to-god bosses. Not impressive or complex bosses, but still
large aliens to fill with lazer fire. Levels
move at a brisk pace so it doesn’t drag on and with the different enemies and
attack patterns the game stays fresh even though it never deviates from its
simplistic arcade roots, barring energy capsules for lazer upgrades. Galaga ’88 is a great space shooter and maybe
the best from either company.
The Winner
After an unimpressive 1986, this year was a huge
turnaround. Aside from Xenophobe, I
loved every game I played for 1987.
Dragon Spirit and Galaga 88 were fantastic shooters while APB and Spy
Hunter 2 were fun driving action games.
This time the winner is a close call, but in the end I have
to give the win to Namco. Midway was
wowing me with its presentation like they always do, and they even made the
game of the year, but apart from that game of the year there was always
something that held their games back.
It’s frustratingly easy to die in Spy Hunter 2, I don’t like the way the
siren has to be aimed in APB and Xenophobe just wasn’t very good as a
whole. Namco stuck with what they knew,
but used their new tech to look and sound just as good as what Midway was
putting out, meaning they had both great gameplay and great presentation. The
worst thing I can say about Namco’s games for this year is Dragon Spirit’s lack
of continues, which stems from me wanting to keep playing. Xybots is awesome, but not awesome enough to
save Midway from a triple whammy of 3 great games from Namco.
Galaga '88 was nice, but holy crap do SNK’s 1987 shooters
school it. Bermuda Triangle is one of my
favorite shooters of the era, but there was also Psycho Soldier, World Wars,
Guerilla Wars and Time Soldiers, solid shooting games all.
Capcom had a less-impressive shooter with 1943, but had more
of a side scrolling action output with Street Fighter, Black Tiger and Tiger Road. The first of those is one of the worst games
ever made and the last one I had a very fun time with.
Although I had more fun playing Capcom and SNK’s 1987
games, Namco and Midway did do better in technical prowess. It was a big deal when SNK had one or two vocal
songs and just a few fuzzy voiced lines for Psycho Soldier, but Midway was
throwing voices all over the place with APB.
Neither Capcom nor SNK was pulling off the kind of 3D illusion achieved
with Pac-Mania and especially not with Xybots, which shows what kind of power
and techno-wizards our current contestants were working with. I hope to see more of that technological
wizardry next year, but I’m probably only going to see that from Midway. Namco only has one game for 1988. Oh dear.
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