COMET OF DESTRUCTION
Time to talk about classic shmups.
This time is Taito's vertical shooter Halley's Comet.
Riders in the skyyyyy! Across the Universe!
We've already reach the point of NO RETUUURN!!
While at first the game will look like a basic shooter with the timeless formula of reach point A to B and fight the boss at the end, the concept is entirely different. First of all, it breaks the traditional premise of going on full offensive, taking down enemies. This time, things are different since the objective here shifts from fighting back to avoid enemies to leave the screen. While in 99% of shmups there's always the pesky enemy that flees unharmed, in Halley's Comet is something that you should prevent at all costs. The reason? One single object that escapes (comet, enemy or missile) will inflict 1% of damage to the planet you're protecting. If it reaches 100%, the game will be over regardless of how many lives you had left. Fortunately, you have a few upgrade items that will provide you support, like speed ups, spread fire and power ups for both spread and front fire. One of the most important ones are the Warps. These are drones that are placed on the sides of your ship. At first they look as if they're the basic Option/Pod that provides additional firing, but you can also use them as screen clearing bombs and like its name says, warp you a little closer to the end of the level. Keep in mind, unlike the Options from Gradius, the Warps can be destroyed by enemy fire. Along with the traditional weapons there's random ones like the Full Power Up, all the 6 Warp Drones at once and a Barrier to protect your ship. Just remember this: Once you find an item from the meteoroid which was confined, you should pick it immediately since they don't stay static or on-screen forever, they'll move offscreen either left or right almost immediately.
Lesson #1 for Anomalous Asteroids:
The first line of defense of the comet is the Escort Fighters.
After surviving the first part of the level, you'll be facing your first boss battle: A large ship which I think its an Escort Fighter which guides the comet until its imminent impact. On the first planets you'll be fighting one, and later you'll face two of them simultaneously. They take a considerable amount of hits, requiring a good power level for your weapons and fast button tapping. Fighting a boss it won't mean you can concentrate on the boss all the time, the small enemies will still appear in an attempt to cause planetary damage by leaving the screen, making your combat strategy focus even more into a defensive stance rather than a full offensive.
Revealing the hidden entrance to the comet's mysteries.
The second phase is virtually identical to the first one. However, it is the boss battle which is different from the previous one. While the first phase pits you against the "Escort" ship that protects the comet, now you are facing the comet's exterior. The comet will reveal "glowing craters" which are the turrets that you must destroy until the crust breaks away and you can get your way inside the comet.
Before Moonfall, there was Halley's Comet.
The third phase of the stage takes place inside the comet, which turns out to be a megastructure/space fortress of some sorts. The rule of destroy everything before they can escape still persist and this is where we fight the true boss of the level: The alien supercomputer. This battle consists of destroying all the panels that will open and close while keeping the enemies from leaving the screen.
Fighting at full power results fun and makes the game quite easier. Even with one Speed up item its more than enough to being able to take down 99% of the enemes without taking a hit, but if you take a hit you're definitely take planetary damages of 10 or 20% as you regain your lost power. For a rookie or an average player this means curtains since this means start all over since there's no continue option.
The less planetary damages, the greater the bonus.
At the end of the three phases that comprise the planet you'll be getting a bonus which is deducted from the planetary damage (500 per planetary damage percentage), and it resets on each planet. If you're a God of this game you'll be clearing worlds with zero damages and getting the 50,000 point bonus and a 1up for doing it so on each one of them. While you expect to complete your mission (and the game) after saving Mars, the cold fact is that the game will loop again until you're finally out of lives and the planetary collision is inevitable.
The arcade game was released in the U.S. by Coin-It Companies from Miami, Florida along with Taito, but for some reason, the game didn't had console ports, until 2003-2004 being the i-Mode and Yahoo Mobile the first ones to get a port under the name Halley Wars. Between 2007-2008, the game was port on the PlayStation 2 as part of the Japan-only Taito Memories II Gekan and Taito Memories II: Eternal Hits. It was until 2021 when Halley's Comet got a worldwide release throughout Hamster's Arcade Archives.
Stealth Camouflage
Graphically is basic, yet detailed as Taito paid enough attention to the visual aspect of the game. Regardless of being space-based all the time, it is the machinery what draws the attention, especially the enemy design more than your ship or the visual effect of the bullets. Speaking of visual effects, the warp animation when a Warp Drone is used is simply amazing and gives the game the speed effect which was used on 80's cartoons and animes. For some reason, there's a few times where the player's ship sprite colors blends with the background, making it a little difficult to see as if it was camouflaged.
The music is quite sci-fi/superhero mix style rather than shmup, as if the first two levels have this somewhat fanfarrious "I want to sound like something out of Buck Rogers and Star Wars" and to be honest, it sounds quite repetitive to hear it on two of the three phases of each planet (20 times to be exact). In contrast, the music for the alien base sounds a bit more shmup-like fitting with the mystery inside Halley's comet, although it has some Legend of Zelda dungeon vibes. The first boss fight is annoying has hell as we have this alarm blaring constantly until the boss is destroyed.
HALLEY'S CURIOSITIES
- First entry of the Halley series. It was followed by Halley Wars on the Famicom Disk System and the Sega Game Gear.
- Curiously, the name Halley Wars was also used for the i-Mode and Yahoo Mobile ports of Halley's Comet.
- The Arcade Archives release is the second home console port of the game.
- According to Cave programmer Hiroyuki Uchida, this game was an inspiration for Dangun Feveron/Fever SOS.
- Likewise, former Toaplan composer Tatsuya Uemura claimed that Halley's Comet influenced Kyukyoku Tiger/Twin Cobra.
- The idea of destroying or damaging the Sun with a comet sounds absurd and impossible. Any object that gets close to its surface will definitely disintegrate due to the heat, solar winds and the Sun's gravity.
- Despite that, comets can indeed plunge into the Sun. An example was Comet Lovejoy in 2011 which re-emerged after its pass through the Sun's corona, but losing a great part of its mass.
- For a giant planet like Jupiter, an impact the size of Halley's comet would be like any other asteroid impact on the planet's history. Since the formation of our Solar System, it was Jupiter which took the great majority of asteroid impacts. If it wasn't for this planet, Earth and the "inner planets" would be even more vulnerable to asteroid impacts.
- The same thing could be said for Saturn due to its size too.
- The premise of an hollow alien structure as a comet is based on the theory about interstellar comets are actually UFO's. Best example is the Oumuamua comet considered as such in some UFO/Conspiracy theories.
- This game tagged Pluto as a planet since science considered it one of the outer planets before its re-classification in 2006.
Just delaying the inevitable as long as Earth don't take the hit.
Halley's Comet is an interesting experiment that changes the common, basic concepts of vertical shooting by making the action shift into a "Base defense" type of game format that would be followed by other games such as S.D.I. and Cloudphobia, and despite not being as popular as other Taito games like Darius or the Space Invaders sequels, it is a curious piece of history that deserves a few tries regardless of being an "endless" shooter.
Looks like classics always get good results on the "Eda Scale".