LIGHT OUR FINEST HOUR
After the trio of surprises from this "Surprise September" from Arcade Archives, Hamster returned to its obsession with Namco.
This time is "Namco Archives" Finest Hour.
You've got the Touch, you've got the POWEEEEEEEEEER!!! YEAH!!
After all is said and done.
You've never walked, you've never run, YOU'RE A WINNER!
Finest Hour looks like an average Run N' Gun where the objective is to traverse the combat area from left to right, but unlike Jail Break or Contra, you don't have to control your character's aim in order to take the enemies out. Instead you're given the "Marker" option to switch between targets. This feature is very experimental for a Run N' Gun since the target switching option is something more exclusive of PC combat simulators like Falcon, F-117A Stealth Fighter and of course Namco's own Ace Combat series. What your robot Sygnus does in this game is that where the Marker is placed, the robot will automatically aim at that target as if the idea was to save time to the player of moving the control stick diagonally or to the other side, resulting in an Autoaiming feature. Even if there's two enemies in the same spot, the Marker will hit the targetted enemy, ditching the "Kill two birds with one stone" idea, and you'll be relying on toggling targets many times. For instance in Stage 2 where you'll be facing a ball with two small invincible drones, you're gonna have to target the ball to take the three of them down. Your weapon is clearly a laser gun with a basic firing rate in both auto (holding button) and manual (fast tapping). While the rest of games give you a jump function, this is omitted in Finest Hour and replaced with the Vernier which acts like a temporary flight in order to avoid enemy fire, because most of the times crouching will not be enough to avoid enemy fire when everyone has 360° aiming. With enemies lurking on the corner and armed with fast firing rifles, homing missiles, exploding "balloons" and laser traps you expect support through power up items, right? Unfortunately, you are not gonna get any of them in this game, not even a weapon power up, limiting you to your gun. The best "Strategy" is to dash by tapping left or right twice and run towards your enemy while firing.
I thought they were made of sterner stuff.
Being sent to a combat zone with no items in sight is one thing, the game will also send you with no lives. So "Dare to be stupid" with the gameplay is no option. Die once and the game's over. You've might think you're done for as soon as you begin playing, but guess what? Your energy is the temperature indicator which drops with time after taking a hit. So basically you have a time based auto-recovery system, but you can't exploit that forever as your mission is also timed. So naturally you'll be in a hurry, and the game will exploit those vulnerabilities as soon as you step in Stage 2 "Distant Early Warning" where you'll be facing gold turret-like structures backed up with super fast drones and suddenly you'll be facing the common green and blue robots, making your Marker decisions a matter of life or death. While most Run N' Guns are linear, Finest Hour breaks that aspect by adding maze-like elements to make the levels longer requiring to take risks and run in order to clear the stage in time. This game had a full sense of experimentation by breaking the standard rules of the Run N' Gun genre by trying to be more practical with aiming and doing emphasis on exploration, something that's not too common on arcade games.
Dare! Dare to believe you can survive
You hold the future in your hand
Dare! Dare to keep all of your dreams alive
It's time to take a staaaaand! You can win if you dare!
Being the 8th most successful arcade of 1989 would mean the game would be ported to the powerful computers like the Sharp X68000 and the FM Towns, along with the then-brand new Sega Genesis which was claiming to be the definitive Arcade-at-Home with Altered Beast to confirm Sega's statements. Unfortunately, Finest Hour wasn't ported to computers or consoles, not even when the SNES arrived where it had the potential to do a near-perfect arcade conversion like it did with Cosmo Gang The Video. Strangefully, it wasn't available on the Namco Museum series either, being the 2009 release on the Japanese Nintendo Wii Virtual Console the only home port of the game, the rest of the world would had to wait until late September 2023 when the game became part of Hamster's Arcade Archives with the features we're already used to along with the trophies which are mostly focused on Original Mode than Hi Score.
Incredible computer imagery you won't see on Nintendo or Sega.
Graphically, the Namco System II hardware had "The Touch" to light the finest hours of this game, with the characteristic pixel rotation and zoom effects on some of the elements of the game like the turrets, a spinning machinery in stage 3 and the zooming "Territories" map between levels, it was backed up with great parallaxing effects on the stage scenery where foreground and backgrounds converge to improve the sense of movement like no other arcade platformer could possibly imagine. While the game doesn't focus too much in zooming effects like Assault or Phelios, it compensates with vibrant coloring and gradient effects on the metal panels and textures of the game, this is notorious in Stage 3.
As for the sound department, the first level lacks of music, leaving you with the footsteps, gunfire and explosions until you're halfway through the stage where the suspense like music plays. As far as sound effects allowed me to hear, the music is more of your serious, suspensful sci-fi thriller styled score with some action in the style of a detective show style soundtrack, breaking with the typical styles from games such as Assault. If there was something Namco was doing great along with the graphics in the System II hardware was the sound quality almost like a CD based game. In Finest Hour's case, this can't be appreciated completely as the sound effects are too loud, especially the footsteps, resulting in a very annoying "Klaka-klaka-klaka-klaka!" blocking the music.
If you're tired of the "Klaka-klaka-klaka" blocking the music, here's a playlist for Finest Hour.
The Offspring - It'll Be a Long Time
Metallica - Better Than You
Foo Fighters - Best of You
P.O.D. - Boom
Foo Fighters - No Son of Mine
FINEST CURIOSITIES
- Finest Hour's debut on Arcade Archives marks the second overall console port of the game, and first worldwide release.
- First Namco title where the protagonist is a ("Mercenary X" manned) robot.
- Vernier is mispelled as "Verneir" in the original arcade version, this was corrected on the Arcade Archives release.
- The stages of the game are named after Rush's songs: "Middletown Dreams", "Distant Early Warning", "Subdivisions"
- Stage 4 "Grace Under Pressure" is named after Rush's 1984 album of the same name.
- "Lough" is Manx Gaelic for the Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Scots word "Loch" used to refer a lake or sea inlet (and a cognate for "Lough" Cornish "Logh" and Welsh "Llwch").
- For a Namco Space/Sci-Fi based game, it is out of the Strangereal/United Galaxy Space Force continuity.
- The idea of tapping left or right twice to dash was later used in Assault Suits Valken/Cybernator and the Megaman X series.
- The game No Man's Sky replaces the jumps with a Vernier-like thruster like in Finest Hour.
"Fighting for the things you know are right" like Stan Bush said.
It might be an obscure arcade title, but Finest Hour is an interesting take on robot combat and the traditional concepts of action/platforming like we've never seen before. Assault Suits and Metal Warriors fans will be happy to give this game a try since this is the closest thing to an Leynos/Valken arcade game.
Now we can only wait what will be Hamster's next move in the Arcade Archives.
The "Eda Scale" is on its "Finest Hour" to give us a positive result.