Eliminate Down - Mega Drive / Genesis

[Restart_Point]

Just bought a Chinese multicart with a few good shooters on, including Eliminate Down. This horizontal shmup came out in Japan and Korea in '93, from a dev called Aprinet that only made two games (according to some Googling) and the other was a driving game.

I've been sufficiently impressed with this curio to write something here. In terms of originality Elimate Down won't win any prizes but it's very impressive on a technical level and so far (reached up to level 4) it's really fun. Two things I like (and always do in such games) are it's simple power-up system, and selectable ship speed, Thunderforce style. Right from the start you get three shooting modes that can be selected at any time; forwards firing, up/down firing and backwards firing, reasonably similar to Toaplan's Hellfire. Like Hellfire, certain parts of levels will be easier with a particular mode, but the levels are not as obviously designed that way like Hellfire, and most of the time forward-firing does the job. UN-like Hellfire, this game has a crazy 'anything goes' attitude with lots of mid-bosses and you'll never guess what's coming next.

The graphics are mostly very impressive, with large sprites, lots of parallax effects, and tons of action on screen with little slowdown or flicker to spoil it. I think the coders must have pulled off a few tricks here as this is clearly achieving better performance and effects from the humble Mega Drive than most earlier games did, and most other shmups for that matter, Thunderforce IV is the only other shooter I can compare it to in this regard. There's lots of graphical effects like simulated rotation that work really well without being too flashy, and they only enhance the gameplay.

It's a fast aggressive game which never lets up in intensity, with rocking Heavy Metal style music to match, and the icing on the cake is the impressive amount of variation in each level, there's a large variety of non-repeating enemies, backgrounds and bosses from one set-piece to another. The difficulty curve has (so far) been very fair, with each new section seeming hard until you have learnt the best method to deal with it.

Seems a shame that 'Aprinet' didn't make any other games like this but who knows, maybe they were coders moonlighting from other developers, or who went on to more well-known things later. Check it out, highly recommended.