Help in naming a Shooter from the mid-90's

[amerika]

Hello!

I was hoping that somebody out there could help me identify or at least narrow down a shooter I would have played at a convenience store in the mid-90's that I had some fondness for at the time...but for the life of me I can't recall the name. This convenience store typically kept fairly new machines rotating through so most likely it was not an older game for the time.

The best details I can recall are:

1. Vertical shooter
2. I believe the play field was bigger than the screen...as in you could move around it.
3. It was a more futuristic/scifi setting
4. It was the first time I'd seen a game where the stage had obstacles and things that would rotate around your ship.
5. I remember the obstacles being more grey than anything.

I know I did not provide the best details but I was hoping that somebody might know which game I am talking about.

Thank you and take care!

[DMC]

Acrobat mission? Sengeki Strikers?
What were the obstacles, like walls? Things you shoot?
Do you think it was arcade or console?

Edit: Super Aleste maybe?

[Rastan78]

More grey than anything else made me think of Viper Phase 1.

[To Far Away Times]

Things rotating around your ship makes me think options like Gradius/Salamander. Salamander switches perspective between horizontal and vertical every level, but it might fit the bill.

[neorichieb1971]

Sounds like Slapfight, but that doesn't have rotating things.

Sounds like Viewpoint, but that isn't vertical scrolling.

Were the obstacles things you could crash into? Like Zaxxon.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Your best bet is manually searching MameDB to see if it rings a bell: EDIT: MAMEDB'S BROKEN ;w; , GO HERE: http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/lista_mame.php Search by the "Shooter" category.

The details you've provided are too vague and can fit any number of games. If you're looking for assistance finding a game, you need to jog your memory and try to remember specifics about the game that would significantly narrow it down such as:

• What colors were the title screen and logo?

• What color was the player ship? What color bullets did you fire? Were the bullets thin or spread out?

• What did the first stage look like? Was it on a planet, did it have buildings, was it in space?

• What did the first boss look like?

• What kind of powerups did it have?

[Jeneki]

When I need to remember an arcade stg, I use this topic: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11597

Estimate the year, then go down the list and use youtube if necessary.

[amerika]

When I need to remember an arcade stg, I use this topic: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11597

Estimate the year, then go down the list and use youtube if necessary.

Yeah, I already did something like this. I'll try again as I sped through them fairly quickly.

And I apologize for being vague. I was young and I only ever got to play the game a decent amount once and only saw it other times. I only ever saw it in that convenience store and never in an arcade.

Acrobat mission? Sengeki Strikers?
What were the obstacles, like walls? Things you shoot?
Do you think it was arcade or console?

The obstacles were lines that would circle around you. It was one of the first times I could ever seeing any type of rotation like that in a game.

It was an arcade cabinet and I live in the US and I was in Kansas specifically (doubt that matters...but it might).

I've went through titles in MAME for those years and nothing triggered my memory :(

I will check out the suggestions I got here, review some of the resources and see if I can figure it out. Thank you very much guys for the assistance.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Is it possible it's not a shoot 'em up? Lines that circle around you as an obstacle reminds me of something like Qix.

Or did they look larger, more like the grey obstacles in Xevious?

Even if you can't remember the game details, does looking at any other games make you think "oh it looked like that"?

[amerika]

Is it possible it's not a shoot 'em up? Lines that circle around you as an obstacle reminds me of something like Qix.

Or did they look larger, more like the grey obstacles in Xevious?

Even if you can't remember the game details, does looking at any other games make you think "oh it looked like that"?

It was definitely a shoot'em up. And yeah, the aesthetic looked like Xevious but much more advanced. In fact, Xevious was the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to figure out how to describe the look of the game. I instead went down a more generic descriptor route since I knew the game I played would have been newer than Xevious.

Yeah, let me go through the lists of games again and, if nothing else, I can at least give a better idea of an example (and maybe outright identify it).

[amerika]

Your best bet is manually searching MameDB to see if it rings a bell: http://www.mamedb.com/ Search by the "Shooter" category.

The details you've provided are too vague and can fit any number of games. If you're looking for assistance finding a game, you need to jog your memory and try to remember specifics about the game that would significantly narrow it down such as:

• What colors were the title screen and logo?

• What color was the player ship? What color bullets did you fire? Were the bullets thin or spread out?

• What did the first stage look like? Was it on a planet, did it have buildings, was it in space?

• What did the first boss look like?

• What kind of powerups did it have?

MameDB seems to be broken. Shooter category looks to only return the first page and nothing else. And there are to many titles per year (over 500 for 1990) to sift through. Search is also broken.

I don't recall the title screen, sadly. I am pretty sure the player ship was grey. I think the first stage had a brown'ish background, but I played through a few stages...and only did that once. The first boss or at least one of the bosses pretty much put you in what felt like a big cage that rotated around your ship. But even that could be me misremembering...kids are dumb and I was no exception. I don't recall the power ups.

The best description I can give is that it had an Xevious sort of futuristic look. But was not as advanced looking as say Viper Phase 1 etc. (it also was not Acrobot Mission or Sengeki Striker).

The rotation around the ship probably was not polygonal either and reminded me of scaling (mode 7 is the easiest way to describe it..but higher quality than that). It was definitely a 2d art game so it wasn't anything made with 3d assets.

Sorry for being so vague!

[BareKnuckleRoo]

MameDB seems to be broken. Shooter category looks to only return the first page and nothing else. And there are to many titles per year (over 500 for 1990) to sift through. Search is also broken.

Oh, sorry, I see it is broken. That's unfortunate. Here's an alternative that's definitely working, try searching for Shooter as the genre and you should be good: http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/lista_mame.php

Is it possible it's Zaviga? You fly above and below obstacles, and when you're below there's a lot of honeycomb style things in the air that can look like they surround your ship. The game also has a lot of brown in it.

[Restart_Point]

Assault (1988) by Namco comes to mind. Shmup-ish vertical screen tank shooter with fully rotating screen.
I remember being impressed by the rotation when I was a kid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiryohquOsE

Probably not this if it's a pure shmup

[amerika]

Assault (1988) by Namco comes to mind. Shmup-ish vertical screen tank shooter with fully rotating screen.
I remember being impressed by the rotation when I was a kid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiryohquOsE

Probably not this if it's a pure shmup

I did look at that one this morning, as I was Googling for vertical shooters with any rotation effects, and that was a top hit. But sadly, no.

MameDB seems to be broken. Shooter category looks to only return the first page and nothing else. And there are to many titles per year (over 500 for 1990) to sift through. Search is also broken.

Oh, sorry, I see it is broken. That's unfortunate. Here's an alternative that's definitely working, try searching for Shooter as the genre and you should be good: http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/lista_mame.php

Is it possible it's Zaviga? You fly above and below obstacles, and when you're below there's a lot of honeycomb style things in the air that can look like they surround your ship. The game also has a lot of brown in it.

Thanks for the new site and it does appear to work nicely! I will go through this and see what I can find.

I just looked at Zaviga and funny enough, that game is very close to what I recall but not it. Zaviga has somewhat of the look and I do remember the stage also not just going forward but could go left and right and sometimes would make you go backwards? But that might have been a boss fight only.

I think it was a bit more advanced looking and a skinnier ship (I think). So close, but no cigar...yet! I'll look through that DB and get back.

Thanks again guys for indulging me on my trip down nostalgia/memory lane. This game was always one I wanted to play again but I never got the chance.

--edit for picture--
I took an image of Zaviga and I added in what I remember seeing. The grey lines would/could rotate around and IIRC the game would move you up like a vertical shooter and then would go left, right and back. And you'd have to be in/around very rudimentary shapes like the grey boxes that could rotate with you or something like that. Again, I am probably misremembering and please don't go to much effort in tracking this down. I just wanted to give a small visual aid in case it helps triggers somebody memory. Also, this would have had to have been a US release only since I played it in a small farm town in Kansas where I grew up.

[pablumatic]

The game sounds like Thunder Force II for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and Sharp X68000 to me. Gray ship. It starts in an overhead brown-ish area and you can get caged up with large fences blocking your path and your options spin around you.

[amerika]

The game sounds like Thunder Force II for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and Sharp X68000 to me. Gray ship. It starts in an overhead brown-ish area and you can get caged up with large fences blocking your path and your options spin around you.

Yeah, it wasn't a console game though and I've played the hell out of the Thunder Force series haha. This was an arcade cab at a convenience store in my home town that used to get a ton of arcade games coming through. I played tons of games when they were new there. They only ever had 2 cabs at a time and rotated them often. TMNT (both), Xmen, Aliens, Simpsons, Street Fighter 2. I remember Afterburner being there for a while, the GI Joe arcade game and other super scaler type games. It was my first experience with SNK/Neo Geo as I played the hell out of, yet hated (still to this day), Magician Lord. F that game and all the quarters it got from me. Very rarely did they have pure shmups though (which is what made this one stand out).

I am not sure about the game details due to probably playing it for less than 30 minutes, but I am sure of approximately when and exactly where the physical location of the cabinet was in the store.

[emphatic]

I think it's Argus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM7cXcGI3rs

[BareKnuckleRoo]

It was my first experience with SNK/Neo Geo as I played the hell out of, yet hated (still to this day), Magician Lord. F that game and all the quarters it got from me.

Haha, there's a few fans on the forum of Magician Lord who've 1cc'd it (two people have done it without taking damage), you should check out these posts!

viewtopic.php?p=1449494#p1449494

viewtopic.php?p=1344292#p1344292

viewtopic.php?p=1414707#p1414707

[sunnshiner]

Long shot... It wasn't Xenon, was it? I know that game's a lot earlier than mid-90s but it did appear in arcade machines.

[Sengoku Strider]

Could it have been Alpha Mission II?

https://youtu.be/ROugVCa_hUg

Even if it wasn't, watching that replay reminded me how just how damn cool this game was in its time. Everything just seemed & sounded big & chunky & epic.

[Kollision]

circling stuff around the ship
grayish / brownish bgs

Image Fight?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Image Fight's a good guess, the first level has brown sections in it and an early boss fires rotating rings you have to dodge through that are a light blue, could easily be misremembered as grey: https://youtu.be/A9ONA6YYz_4?t=158

[Restart_Point]

The screen rotation thing is the only clue, otherwise it could be any one of a thousand shmups

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Yeah, "The first boss or at least one of the bosses pretty much put you in what felt like a big cage that rotated around your ship" is the only really distinctive element described here that'd make a game stand out... and I honestly can't think of any other arcade games that fit the time period that had an early boss with attacks that encage you like in Image Fight.

[amerika]

Yeah, I had looked at Image Fight in the arcade, but I already knew it from playing it on the PCE.

The closest game a person has suggested is Argus - https://youtu.be/YM7cXcGI3rs?t=230 The game I recall had grey square/rectangles like that, but they would encircle you specifically in a boss fight. And you weren't always flying "up" but sometimes navigating around the screen IIRC. I want to say this might have been the first time I saw scaling and rotation in this way so it might be an even earlier game than '88 but when I played it would have been at least 1990 or 91.

I've also went through that database for year 1988 all the way through 1993 and I found nothing that stood out. I brought up YT videos on almost anything that looked like it could be it and found nothing, sadly.

What are the chances that this might have been a low run game that has never been dumped which is why I've had a hard time finding it again over the years? I'm not excluding the fact that I might just not be remembering correctly, but is there a chance this simply is a game that is lost to time?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Might be possible for an older, more obscure game, but a convenience store in Kansas is more likely to have something widely available, and more modern releases tend to be dumped, especially mid to late 90s games. As far as I know, a lot of the undumped stuff is very old games (like, pre-JAMMA), and games that required very specific hardware to play (Vertexer), but I'm not an authority on the subject of game dumping. That's not counting stuff where dumps exist and it's simply not playable in MAME yet.

I think it's unfortunately more likely that you're misremembering the game details or that your memory's vague enough that even if you saw the game you'd played you'd have trouble identifying it. There's the real possibility that you'll never "find" it even if you see video of it. However, you've got a big list of games to hunt through at least so if there's a chance the name or a screenshot will jog your memory, it's just a matter of sifting through it patiently.

[amerika]

Yeah, you are probably right. What is weird is that I know if I played the game and especially the first stage, I would know it. I've watched TONS of videos so far through the first parts of the games and none of them had the features I was talking about. I just remember being blown away by the rotation that was going on around the ship (but the whole field was not rotating so it was not Assault). But memories are funny things.

And yeah, I agree with the Kansas/convenience store assessment. I have memories of all the super popular arcade cabs as they all got rotated through that store over time. What stands out about this particular game is that it was not there for very long and I never once saw it anywhere else. It was also the only shooter besides UN Squadron and Afterburner (if that counts) being there. Which is part of why I am so curious to find it again. My guess is, if/when I find it, I'll play it and go "man, that was not worth the effort". But, as we all know, that is how curiosity works a lot of time haha.

[Rastan78]

Any chance it's Ark Area?

https://youtu.be/qlRG7xbphL0

[emphatic]

Last Mission? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3EmF44IqMU&t=407s

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Wow, that actually fits most of what was described, especially the boss at 6:30. Wouldn't surprise me if that's the game.