HAMSTER SAID "IT'S SHARK WEEK ON ARCADE ARCHIVES"
Well, not precisely THAT Shark Week, but this week's entry puts a different type of Shark in the game: Mad Shark by Allumer.
Raiden-esque action from the makers of an R-Type clone!
Just like I said on my review of Rezon, most developers go for the basic, easy to play shmups like Gradius or Raiden. Allumer returns and this time they've decided to take things a little easier from their R-Type II clone and bring us a Raiden clone. That is Mad Shark. The name sounds like a Toaplan name, so Allumer cloned not one, but two shmups.
Before hopping into your Shark and engage the enemy, you need to know the weaponry of this Megalodon of steel. It may look simple, but these weapons will not hesitate to bite the enemy.
MAD MISSILE (Yellow): Not "Madmoiselle", this is your default weapon, a semi-spread missile artillery that increase its width addressing with lateral threats on a basic scale.
SHARK VULCAN (Red): This is like the red powerup from Raiden: A very wide spread vulcan designed to pulverize your enemies in a very wide scale.
DAMA LASER (Blue): Like in Raiden, this is the full frontal all-power type laser weapon which pummels anything on its way.
Side weaponry and Special Armaments are no exception, and this game gives you the basics, but still effective.
BIRD MISSILE: The Homing missile of the game, it fires automatically with your shots.
SIDEBURNS BOMB: This is the Special Weapon of the game, drop the bomb and see how enemies fall and clears the screen of bullets.
Is not a Mario invincibility star.
While in Raiden you can get a fairy who gives you a few power ups after losing a life, Mad Shark grants you a Special Star which allows you to respawn once with the power level you had before you die. While the power level of your weapon is saved, your Bird Missile is lost and you have to get it again. One of these stars can be found in Stage 1.
The Mad Shark pilot was paid by Gran Turismo to wreck Forzathon.
Remember the passing car bonus in Raiden?, Allumer also took notes from that and added not one, but three simultaneous cars that grant you 50,000 points each. 5 Times the score from the same bonus in Raiden. While Raiden utilizes the medal items, Allumer also relies on them and improvises them giving them a fast number changing bonus mechanic which ranges from 100, 2000, 5000 and 10000 points. This basically predates the "Chain" mechanic from Psikyo's Strikers 1945 series.
Mad Shark is clearly a Raiden clone up to the weapon mechanics and some of the boss fights, but jumps into the originality with the 3 weapon configuration instead of two, well, this is more like Raiden II which was released the same year, but rather than a flexible beam, this game adds an alternate wide shot (Mad Missile). In fact, it ditches the frontal missile as a sub-weapon making it the third weapon. Like Rezon, if you die, you're sent back to a checkpoint, just like the japanese version of Raiden and effectively resets the obtained bonus items, and puts you in a more difficult situation as you will probably get outnumbered by enemy fire or even the boss itself, unless you're playing with a second player to remove the checkpoint function. One small problem is how the Bird Missile is powered up. While in Raiden, upgrading the Homing Missile increased the number of missiles fired (From two missiles to eight missiles) travelling speed and homing efficiency, in Mad Shark you only fire two pairs of projectiles and improves their tracking capabilities. This reduction on the firing rate could be exploited by the enemy, along with the lack of a "Power Type" missile since that function was given to the Mad Missile. High scoring is very easy in this game since picking an extra item when you're fully powered up (shot or missile) gives you large amounts of points such as 10000 points (the double than Raiden) and both bomb and medal are 10000 points worth, which is way even more than Raiden and seems like Allumer was way too generous with the bonus mechanics of the game.
We're leaving together, but still it's farewell.
And maybe we'll come back to Earth, who can tell?
This game had no distribution in other sides of the world, making it a Japan exclusive, and combined with the obscurity Allumer titles had it never got a console port, being destined to be buried in the sands of time and forgotten forever, which was a terrible decision since the consoles in 1993 would take any arcade game to prove themselves to be the "Arcade at Home" especially the SNES which was the most Arcade-Accurate capable of the gang. Being an obscurity was the more than obvious fate for Allumer's Raiden-clone until Hamster decided to release the game 30 years later as part of the Arcade Archives lineup (and as part of that obnoxious and predictable "Namco-Surprise-Namco-Taito" pattern of game releases), giving the game new features from the game settings and enable rapid fire in rates of 10 to 30 along with the Hi-Score and Caravan modes with their respective trophies.
The storyline is "Use your imagination".
This just reminds me of what Seanbaby said when he criticized the NES Wayne's World game.
Looks like Hamster passed the responsibility of the imagination to the gamers. ¿Don't you hate when that happens? Well, how 'bout this: A human colony from Mars has rebelled declaring total war on Earth compromising the fourth planet's terraforming project and its future colonization, and you are sent to repel the Martian rebellion for the sake of both worlds. Yeah, I wrote that based on the Earth-to-Mars trip this game was.Seanbaby wrote:It's like when cereal designers rerelease Lucky Charms with a new shape of oat-blobs and name it after the latest cartoon. It doesn't take a third grade degree to spot that Spider-Man cereal is just Chex with some Lucky Charms marshmallows. That's not a cereal about Spider-Man. That's a mess on the floor of the cereal factory. It's tragic.
One day, the cereal and Nintendo people finally ran out of imagination, and they passed the responsibility for it on to the kids. It takes a massive amount of creativity to see anything having to do with Spider-Man in your Spider-Man cereal. But if you're having trouble, there's a hot-line you can call to get an out of work cereal designer to stand over you during your breakfast and scream, "STOP CALLING THOSE CHEX! THOSE ARE NINJA NETS! Wh-wh... Whoa. Did you just call that a marshmallow? THAT'S A DEPTH CHARGE, YOU VISION-LESS BASTARD!!!"
Stunning 3D Graphics! An unexpected move from Allumer.
The gameplay is an obvious take on Raiden, but graphically it makes an effort on being more original unlike their R-Type II clone Rezon and their puzzle game Magic Speed with its stolen/rip-off graphics from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (how Nintendo didn't noticed that?, I don't know). While the natural scenery looks in-between simple and average with a few visual effects like the clouds reflected on the river on Round 1, the artificial structures are incredibly well drawn and heavily detailed. This is notorious on the industrial based Round 3. For a Sci-Fi/Futuristic game, the urbanism remains in the "Modern day" like architecture with the buildings and hangars. The same goes for the vehicles in the streets such as the cars and trucks. Speaking of designs, the enemies you fight doesn't resemble too much of an alien fleet and look more like man-made weaponry, implying the enemy is a human faction while Raiden and Raiden II clearly implied the enemy was from another planet.
While Raiden II had an impressive CG-ish intro with the ship taking off, Allumer tried its own take on 3D graphics but using it on the cutscene for the Ranking Screen on Attract Mode. Rather than the digitized CGI from Raiden II, Allumer relied on a more "Polygonal" in the style of Falcon 3.0 and StarFox. For a low budget company like Allumer, this short animation and intrincated 3D models were pretty well made and are an accomplishment. This "Tridimensionality" is also noticed on the asteroids on Round 5 which despite being the basic "spheric rocks" they have a "realistic" rolling effect. Speaking of Raiden, when the ship reached power level 5, it transforms. In Mad Shark, your ship transforms twice as you power up.
The sound department is a major improvement from what we've heard on Rezon as we have a higher quality soundtrack that while is still composed by a few loops, it sounds more like a composition rather than a bizarre cacophony and to be fair, the best track of all is the one from Round 3 since it feels like if Tangerine Dream pulled a Vapor Trail in what I call "Calmed Rock" which sounds calm and upbeat it doesn't lack of strength to fit on a shmup. The level clear tune is short and for some reason it sounds like the "Capcom Guitar" from the SNES games, and the boss theme sounds more like an introduction to a final stage rather than a boss fight with this calm yet suspensive tune that clearly sounds like an introduction theme before the real boss theme hits the scene. Speaking of sounds, the sounds from this game vary from the OK to average as the enemy explosions and the bomb blast are quite nice, but the laser and the bullet hitting sound could be annoying.
MAD CURIOSITIES
- Some of the developers of the game became part of MOSS's staff who made legit Raiden games starting with Raiden III.
- First Allumer title to use CG-like graphics (on Attract Mode).
- Third Allumer entry on Arcade Archives.
- The Arcade Archives release is the first and only console port of the game after 30 years.
- It is possible that the "Dama" used on Dama Laser comes from the kanji "玉" ("ダマ" in Katakana and "だま" in Hiragana) which means Jewel, thus, you can call it "Jewel Laser".
- Curiously, the word "Dama" is spanish for "Lady".
- The presence of liquid water rivers on Mars (Stage 6) implies the events of the game take place centuries in the future during the early phase of the planet's terraforming process where atmospheric composition and climate are on the minimal requirements to sustain liquid water, but still inhospitable for complex lifeforms.
On it's 30th anniversary.
Just in time.
Hamster gave us a nice surprise bringing another Allumer game to our consoles. Mad Shark is a Raiden clone and another Allumer product to the B-Tier arcade/shmup bunch, but this time Allumer showed they had what it takes to compete with Seibu Kaihatsu's masterpiece of shooting. While being another addition to the list of Raiden clones, this one is quite fun enough to give it a few tries and get a few more trophies as we wait for Hamster to release Raiden II one of these days.
A nice result on the Lea Scale.