Pet shmup story suspicions?

[Skyknight]

I'll own that shmup stories don't tend to draw a lot of attention. Still, I sometimes come up with odd thoughts as to what might be going on behind the scenes. Things that the designers themselves might not have initially planned, but...

Here's some such thoughts from me...

X-MULTIPLY: I noticed that Irem's posters refer to the X-002 itself as microscopic, implying it was built that way, so I doubt that they had to shrink a pilot down (or could; if they could do that, they might not have to go so far as to build the ship microscopic to begin with, even if what Bykhee was doing was unprecedented). Thus, I suspect the cockpit is really housing a camera eye, not a pilot. So, who's controlling its movements and gunfire?

How about, via mental command, the infected woman herself?

BLAST WIND: St. 3 is called Atlantis (I'm sure the extra S was an example of misunderstanding the katakana), and whichever style Sodom you fight, it has a pair of power cells reading "Orihalcon". That's a pretty common Japanese rendition of "orichalcum", a brassy metal strongly associated in one of Plato's dialogue with the fallen city Atlantis. That dialogue, by the way, was alluding to a Star Wars-style long time ago, in which technologically superior, yet evil and decadent, Atlantis (even though its main weapons were war chariots, which admittedly WAS cutting edge in Plato's day) was flattened by Old Athens, empowered by their piety. St. 4 apparently starts out in Atlantis, but quickly segues to a pure-technological abyss "Gate to Under-World", leading to Gorn's subterranean heart (implying that Atlantis is actually a Gorn outpost...and if they built something like this right from the world's mantle or whatever, I can see why the world itself, living and inorganic alike, ended up doomed to destruction. This was probably just a small sample of Gorn "improvements"...). Also, the good guys (who outlive Gorn, if not on the original world) are called Noa. As in, the survivor of the ruin of the original world in Genesis.

I suspect that Blast Wind's setting isn't Earth, but a fictional original human(oid) homeworld that Gorn's hubris literally killed; the shuttle that transfers Noa's children to a new world, protected by Forn and Kyou, is probably meant to be analogous to the Ark, with Earth (and maybe other worlds...see later) filling in for Mt. Ararat. Stories of the Noa/Gorn war would have filtered through time into the legends of divine wars, various catastrophes of old (q.v. Noah, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Utnapishtim, etc.) and the fate of such wicked cities as Atlantis and Sodom (well, in this game, Sodom was Atlantis's guardian, not another city, but...).

I'm not finished though. The ending implies that after Noa's evacuation, the homeworld degenerated into a ball of magma, thanks to Gorn's attempt to transform the whole thing into a technological artefact (the Gate to Under-World, somehow creating farmland in the WORLD'S SUNLESS MANTLE, the limitless tech background while chasing the Gorn hierophant's personal vessel, Gorn calls itself the "World of Technology"...). I can't help but wonder, though, if the hierophant's will and some of the machinery he crash-landed into (NOT inside his vessel) might have survived the metamorphosis. In the intervening years, as the homeworld cooled back down, perhaps going from thinking himself (well, by now ITself) the leader of the forces of Heaven, to being the leader OF Heaven...the new god, hostile to all unlike it...

Blast Wind...distant prequel to the Thunder Force series? ("Gorn" and "Orn" sound enough like each other, and Chaos is some kind of BIO-computer AI...)

RAIDEN: In the second and third games, you'll see near the final battle statues that look like they might have been inspired by Babylonian art. On top of that, what are farmland and trees doing in R2's final stage? Perhaps the "aliens" are really former inhabitants of Earth. Although whether humans or self-styled gods might be a matter of debate...R2 and R3's final bosses do seem like temples, so perhaps it's both. A corrupt civilization of humans somehow exiled from the planet itself, serving alien crystal gods...

STRIKERS 1999: Yes, the X-36 is real, sans the shapeshifting, but it's not called Warlord, or anything else (q.v. P-38 Lightning & Co.). That led me to wonder if F.G.R. somehow survived the events of S1945II, and Warlord is actually one of THEIR weapons, one of the few to escape nanite infection (with bosses one through five infected F.G.R. vessels. Nothing was said about the nanites being able to MAKE vessels, and they probably would have gone straight to Shadow Blinder-style, without bothering with Earthly forms. That the shapeshifters and the final stages' enemies share a bug theme is probably coincidence.). What must it have been like for them to have to ask their old enemy Strikers for help, I wonder...?

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Have you thought about how Success Corp. came up the Psyvariar Medium Unit game title & what it really means? Could the Psyvariar name be short for Psychic Variant? And that Success thought that "Variar" rather than "Variant" looks cooler and decided to go with that spelling instead? The background story relating to Psyvariar is complex...

And how does Psyvariar Revision's background story fit in with the first one, Psyvariar-MU (or is it a "spin-off")?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Zeether]

You mentioned that Gorn calls itself "World of Technology", that is Technosoft's tagline in it's logo.

[Mortificator]

X-MULTIPLY: I noticed that Irem's posters refer to the X-002 itself as microscopic, implying it was built that way, so I doubt that they had to shrink a pilot down (or could; if they could do that, they might not have to go so far as to build the ship microscopic to begin with, even if what Bykhee was doing was unprecedented). Thus, I suspect the cockpit is really housing a camera eye, not a pilot. So, who's controlling its movements and gunfire?

How about, via mental command, the infected woman herself?

Yeah, it makes more sense if the ship was already microscopic. But letting a patient operate on herself seems kind of negligent. And almost anyone would freak out with that stuff inside them.

Doctor: "Well, we're conducted some tests and think we're found out what's causing your illness."
Patient: "What is it?"
Doctor: "This."

[Skyknight]

I was just thinking of how in the ending, Bykhee salutes her opponent's "bravery". If the X-002 is remote-controlled, then the only way the adulation makes sense is if the controller was in some other sort of danger than directly getting shot/dissolved/whatever.

Having to personally face down the things your own immune system failed to deal with--and ones that probably could call Yog-Sothoth (grand*x)-daddy--ought to do a nice job of putting your sanity in danger...

[BIL]

I still wonder what exactly happened in Metal Black's "good" ending (not the one you receive for a game over on Stage 6, which seems rather more clear cut).

"Or was it all a dream? Nobody know yet for sure..."

[doodude]

Man, I wish the company I work for didnt do random drug testing so I could really be a part of this thread too...

...

[BIL]

That's a good explanation for Metal Black, either on the pilot or the writer's part.

[spadgy]

Pet shmup story suspicions?

I suspect it was my pet rabbit Banzai that chewed through all my J Saturn wires and ate the cover of my Master System R-Type, but the little shit's dead now...

[Zeether]

X-MULTIPLY: I noticed that Irem's posters refer to the X-002 itself as microscopic, implying it was built that way, so I doubt that they had to shrink a pilot down (or could; if they could do that, they might not have to go so far as to build the ship microscopic to begin with, even if what Bykhee was doing was unprecedented). Thus, I suspect the cockpit is really housing a camera eye, not a pilot. So, who's controlling its movements and gunfire?

How about, via mental command, the infected woman herself?

Yeah, it makes more sense if the ship was already microscopic. But letting a patient operate on herself seems kind of negligent. And almost anyone would freak out with that stuff inside them.

Doctor: "Well, we're conducted some tests and think we're found out what's causing your illness."
Patient: "What is it?"
Doctor: "This."

"No hotlinking" image.

[jp]

Loved the Blast Wind write up. Actually, I've often thought Orn was just Gorn in the future as well!

Personally, I think all of Tecno Soft's shooters are tied together though. Well, maybe not Elemental Master, but all the other ones for sure.