Long Lost NMK Title: Space War

[kuze]

According to the historical NMK page at http://www.higenekodo.jp/untiku/nmk.htm there was a title developed by NMK after Wangan Sensou:

★ There is a thing that was developed under the title of "Space War" after "Gulf War".

Is anything known about this game? Any screenshots, video, etc?

[trap15]

There's a decent amount of information about Uchuu Sensou on post #80 here http://ton.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/retro/983805176/ (I think 5ch is blocked outside Japan, you can use google translate to proxy it anyways though, or you can just read my translation below)

Features are as follows: [text in square brackets are my own commentary]

• You don't die from touching enemies
• Select a ship type at the start
• Boost (invincible and temporary powerup) instead of bombs [sounds like a hyper system somewhat similar to what was present in P-47 Aces's location test, except stockable]
• Stage branching
• Each stage (called a "site") has a title that is a play on a movie title. For example, "私は舞降りた" and "地獄の抑止力" (lmao)
• It's using NMK's hardware, which has no zooming or rotation, but the effects are elaborate despite that
• It's a boss fight focused game (like Radiant Silvergun)
• Danmaku shooting (before Donpachi?)
• It was quite suspicious looking (at first glance, it didn't look japanese)

Some other knowledge I've picked up is that it ran on the same hardware as Rapid Hero; was a different programmer from most other NMK games, but based on the Rapid Hero source code; was planned and partly drawn by UPL's Mutsuo Kaneko; the music is by Akira Hirokami who mostly seemed to get put on titles that didn't get finished. Additionally, it's the first game I know of that features a grazing system as its scoring mechanic, and it's also a game with a bomb fragment system before Battle Garegga (probably inspired from Gun Frontier just like Garegga though)

[kuze]

Those are some juicy details, thanks so much for sharing trap15!

Do you happen to know about how far along it made it in development? It would be really cool if it had made it as far as location tests.

Hopefully it isn't completely lost to time and has been (or will be) preserved. Some of those mechanics like bullet grazing and bomb fragments would be really cool to see. NMK was certainly ahead of its time!!

[trap15]

Yes it was location tested, that's how that poster knew about the game. To my knowledge most of the data is lost, but it would definitely be cool if it could be found...

[KAI]

So this was chaosfield meets garegga? damn, i would kill for some footage.

[Despatche]

So you mean to tell me we almost had three different games with grazing all coming out at the same time? Why do I get the feeling there's more too?