OLD WARBIRDS, RETRO ARCADE ACTION
Still going with the Arcade Archives reviews.
This time we will take a break from Namco and give a chance to Universal Playland (UPL) with USAAF Mustang.
In the arcade days it was on an obscure corner while other games drew more attention.
Originally developed by Nihon Maicom Kaihatsu, better known as NMK but distribuited by UPL, USAAF Mustang is a basic shmup where the controls are on the Gradius level of having the traditional frontal fire backed up by the air-to-ground bomb. Unlike Konami's classic shmup or Taito's Darius, the bomb is fired in-simultaneous with the regular fire, since this is one of those shmups which required two buttons to work. One for the shot and missile/bomb and the special attack, in this case is a weapon called Strike Forcer, which is an energy beam that passes through enemies and grants you a brief period of invincibility. You can stack a total of 8 of them and keep those 8 when you lose a life. Unfortunately, the Strike Forcer stock doesn't replenish in the next life if you ran out of them, making the use of this item more of a strategy than bomb spamming. You only have to level your shots two times in order to be at full power. Level 1 is the basic front fire with low bomb drop rate, level 2 adds an inclinated Gradius-like Double shot and increases the bomb drop rate and level 3 adds turns the double shot in to a basic 3 way spread fire with a very improved bomb drop rate in order to take down your enemies. One of the most common things on enemy bullet spreads is the pattern used: Most of the times they fire first a slow one, followed by a fast one.
Learning about this is essential in this game because the major difficulty spike is the enemy spam that will become abundant after level 2, as the game will indeed throw you more popcorn enemies that your bullets can take on, and if you're powerless you'll end up easily overwhelmed by the enemy, not to mention the boss battle in Stage 5 (Burma) where the boss acts on pure coward style by ambushing you by falling from above and then suddenly backed up by two large planes, forcing you to be on the middle of the screen spending more time taking the main plane's missiles than hitting the boss. The second problem with this game is that the game doesn't indicate if you're damaging the medium/large enemies and bosses. In any other shmup or game, the game will clearly indicate if you're inflicting them damages or not by making them blink white, yellow or red. Like Thunder Dragon, USAAF Mustang doesn't indicate that, making you think your bullets are uneffective against major enemies and bosses and forcing you to burn a Strike Forcer when it wasn't necessary.
This game is one of those infinite loop type of games where after completing the final stage, it sends you back to level 1 until you lose your last life and decide not to continue the game. For some reason, the game lacks of a Ranking/Name Entry, making your efforts look anonymous if you're the kind of gamer who likes to presume your score and challenge other players to take it down.
For some reason, USAAF Mustang was only ported to the Sega Genesis, but in a very bad conversion. Considering it was released by Taito, it was a terrible port with stages removed (Yamato and Berlin), bosses changed and the music was badly rendered. Being the enemy bullets more recognizable as such, the amazing parallax scrolling in the Alps stage and the digitized photography the positive aspects of the game. ¿Why picking the Genesis when they had the more arcade accurate capable SNES?, I don't know. We had to wait 31 years to be able to play an arcade perfect port of this game in our consoles, yeah, we had to wait until 2021 when Hamster decided to include this on the Arcade Archives series, where for our fortune it is the USAAF Mustang that most of us will remember from the arcade. Since the releases were based on the Japanese ROM, the game only has one Original Mode, featuring the additional Hi-Score and Caravan Mode that we're used and I've talked too much about them since I began reviewing Hamster's arcade ports since the ACA Neogeo era. One of the major advantages along with the Save function is the autofire with different rates, while this gives you a slight help with the enemy spam and even killing bosses faster without using a single Strike Forcer, you'll still be vulnerable to the enemy spamming.
Visually stunning for an obscure arcade game.
Graphically in terms of color palette it is your average "Non-Neogeo", "Non-CPS" shmup with what we can call the basic color palette to take a stand against larger commercial titles which were taking arcades by surprise back then. While not dull and "dirty" like Thunder Dragon, is still below the level of Capcom's shmups like U.N. Squadron. Despite being a lesser powerful hardware than the CPS-1, NMK made a decent job on exploiting the concept of the parallax scrolling. With a great start at stage 1 with its four ground layers that not just work on the movement effect, but also on placing enemies which adds a more immersive, in-depth effect in the game's atmosphere. The Alps (stage 6) is perhaps the one which uses the most layers in the whole game which looks visually impressive for the time being and it is the single time we will see a large concentration of layers for the ground. Being the sea levels the weakest of all as they're one single layer. A major problem with the graphics will be the enemy bullet colors. Being white blinking bullets they can be easily confused with the background, the same goes with the Anti-Air Artillery in some stages which are white blasts without the black border of the bullets, making them much more easier to blend with the background. The final stage looks quite weird for a night scenery, it looks more like an old town with an outer space background as if the final battle was suddenly warped to a strange region in the universe. It is worth to mention how NMK did the spinning prop effect of all the aircraft as vertical running gray pixels. It manages to do the fast spinning illusion very well and they also added the effect on the extra lives icons.
As the name of the game implies, it takes place in World War II. Yeah, one of those "Historic Military" themed games in the vein of Capcom's 194X series, although this one is horizontal scrolling rather than vertical. Aside from the beam weapon that is the Strike Forcer, the game takes cues from World War II sending the player through the Nazi-occupated Europe and the Japan controlled Pacific Ocean-Indochina region. There's a few inconsistencies like the Messerschmitt Me-264's on Burma (Stage 5). While in most shmups, player 1 is the red aircraft and player 2 is blue (like in Raiden for instance), the game pulls a Double Dragon and makes player 1 blue and player 2 red. The music while it takes cues from the first Thunder Force games, the sound card of the game sounds quite weird making the guitaring sounds a little bit more like a noise rather than notes, but the percussion and keys are quite decent, and the final stage theme is perhaps one of the best tracks of the game.
MUSTANG FUN FACTS
- For a game that uses a real world plane it lacks the license of Boeing, current owners of North American Aviation / North American Rockwell / Rockwell International, which owns the P-51.
- The instruction card called the Power Up as "POWOR UP"
- For an NMK game, Hamster released the game under the distributor's name UPL.
- Like Thunder Dragon, there's a bootleg that uses Seibu's sound card, which means stolen music and sound effects from Raiden. In USAAF Mustang's case, the game plays these themes in the following order: "Rough and Tumble > Gallantry > Lightning War > Rough and Tumble > Gallantry > Lightning War > Gallantry > Fighting Thunder" throughout the stages.
It was not an easy ride. But it was fun enough to keep playing for a while.
Arcade Archives: USAAF Mustang is the unexpected homeporting of an somewhat obscure arcade game where massive enemy placement based difficulty will be the major challenge rather than bullet patterns. If you want to revisit some hard difficulty arcade nostalgia, this might be the game for you. If you're a casual shmupper, just pick it for a quick vintage-flavored trophy boost.
Looks like this sounds more like "Worth the time and money".