This is kind of a weird question, but I thought this would be the best place to ask it.
Back in the late 80's and early 90's when I was collecting shmups, I noticed that several of the PCEngine and PCE-CD shmups had the words "Caravan" or "Carnival" associated with them. Some examples were Super Star Soldier and Nexzr...there were others but I don't remember them.
I never figured out what this "Caravan" was supposed to mean. What made these shmups special? Were they linked to each other somehow? My guess was that these shmups were part of some ongoing competition or tournament.
From 1985 to 1992, they (Hudson) actually ran a nationwide (in Japan) gaming tournament called the "Hudson All-Japan Caravan Festival", where players could compete and test their skills with each other. Each year, they'd have a new game to challenge their legions of fans - and given that they were quite popular back in the day, the genre of choice was the overhead shooter.
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The PC Engine games actually had seperate versions released for the tournaments, with specialized rules for competetive play. The object was simply to score as most points as possible in a limited amount of time. Even after ending their event, Hudson continued to put 2 and 5 minute "Caravan" modes into their games, as an ode to times past.
Once I get back home (I'm at work atm) I'll post a link to a video from one of these competitions. It's very cool to watch even if it's completely in japanese, it shows some very heated Super Star Soldier play.
alpha5099 wrote:I wonder if any of those kids are the guys who dominate all the shmup high scores these days.
Y'know, I actually asked Randorama about this and he said the winner looks a bit like LAOS. Hard to confirm, of course.
...unless someone with a knack for the japanese language would care to translate the video and make subtitles for it? I know some programs can just read the subtitles from a simple .txt file, so it'd be just a case for translating and setting the timing.
No matter how good a game is, somebody will always hate it. No matter how bad a game is, somebody will always love it.
