THE POWER OF THE (TASK) FORCE
Superpowers flex their wings.
Hold the world on puppet strings.
Egos will feed while citizens bleed.
That's always the way it goes.
Hamster knows that a fast way to assemble, build and get a lineup of games ready is by releasing shmups, and mostly when they're from dead companies they picked up from legal limbo.
This time is NMK's Task Force Harrier (published by UPL).
REASONS TO LAY DOWN THE CASH:
- Fly your very own Harrier jet
- Enough Air-to-Air and Air-to-Ground firepower to psych out the entire Soviet Union
- Slam a missile on a Soviet government building
Your British Aerospace Harrier V is a great formidable VTOL aircraft, but in this game, needs to be powered up. Fortunately, you have a basic, yet functional disposal of weaponry waiting to be used.
NORMAL SHOT (Sup): The power up for the Harrier V. Improves its firing capability making the frontal firing weapon into a wide-spread fire type as long as you don't get hit. It upgrades up to 7 levels.
CORSAIR MISSILE (Blue-Red Emblem): Calls two white Mini-Harriers that fire fast full-frontal missiles, making this the "Power Missile" of the game.
MIRAGE MISSILE (Black-Red-Yellow Emblem): The Homing Missile type. Summons small green Harriers that fire missiles with target tracking capabilities. As it gets powered up, more missiles are fired on each shot.
GUNSHIP VULCAN (Red-White Emblem): Summons helicopters that provide firing which swings on angles as the Harrier moves. Level 1 is a frontal fire, while levels 2 and 3 are a "\ /" fire increasing the Harrier V's spread fire capabilities from "\| |/" to \\|| ||//" adding frontal and diagonal fire, making these an more than ideal option for the player.
AIR TO GROUND ORDNANCE
To pulverize your enemies, you will definitely need more than just bullets and missiles. The Harrier V is equipped with lethal Air-to-Ground weaponry to take down the enemy below you.
BI - NORMAL SHOT: Your Xevious-like basic bomb, it can be upgraded three times adding a wider bomb firing.
BII - DISPENSER: Fires a bomb that leaves a trail of wide explosions as it runs across the screen on vertical path. Ideal for blasting enemies from a far away distance.
BIII - BOMB: When a single ranged blast is needed, this is the weapon. Fires bombs that generates a wide explosion on impact, destroying multiple enemies.
Show those guys you're not afraid of a group of Hind's.
Task Force Harrier is a vertical shmup which follows basic aspects, to be more exact, the same mechanics as Namco's Xevious and Dragon Spirit and UPL's own XX Mission as the gameplay is based on using standard frontal firing for air based enemies and short ranged bombs against ground targets. But unlike Xevious, there's no sight to tell you where the bomb will hit, requiring "eyeball sighting" from the player, acting even more like Dragon Spirit. However, the difference here is the support units that provide you extra fire, at least for Anti-Air situations providing you the basic support for your aircraft. While in games like Scramble Formation if your escort ships were hit they're destroyed, the escorts in Task Force Harrier can take all the hits required to keep you alive. You can even use them to destroy a mid-sized enemy by simple touching them with the small ships.
While you have a non-mentioned exploit from the game, the game will exploit all the disadvantages you have. Starting off with the lack of bombs. On the majority of shmups from the mid-late 80's, you're given a bomb to clear the screen when you think things are getting tough. In this game, you're bombless, and that puts you on a critical situation in some boss battles and a few instances of the game, like the jets that appear from behind you at the beginning of stage 3. Challenge is not based on super fast bullets or massive bullet hell sprays, but on precise firing from the enemies, while using simple patterns, creative formations and constant missile firing, it is quite challenging trying to score a hit without exposing yourself to narrow spots as a boss confines you on a small space as it moves. This happens with one of the later bosses. Another problem is that a few of the game's bosses have not-blinking issues. In any normal game, when a boss takes a hit, it blinks confirming it received your shot and took damage. For instance, the "Flying Wing" boss from stages 2 and 4, while the cannons does blink, the whole airship doesn't and the only confirmation that it goes down is that explodes after taking all your shots. The same goes for the Fuel Establishment vehicle boss. As you advance to the final levels, the former bosses from previous levels will appear as mid bosses making the final levels more harder than necessary if your bomb levels are lower than the required.
The objective here is to leave the enemy gasping. In Intensive Care.
After defeating the first boss of the game, you'll be on the second half of the level known as "Destruction Target". This is the full Air-to-Ground stage of the game and you've better get ready for the change of rules here. First off: Your side-weapons are unavailable in this segment, but the blast radius of your Air-to-Ground weapons will increase, making you able to take more targets and even structures within the blast. This is far more effective for the BIII Bomb. Second, your standard shot is no longer screen range and it stops after reaching the half of it, making "Long range shooting" uneffective and requiring you to get closer to take down the targets. At the end of this phase you're granted a bonus based on how many enemies were taken down, being 100000 points the perfect bonus for a 100% destruction rate.
The cold answer to T-X's burning question: Use a long range attack.
While shmup games give you liberties on which weapon you want to use, there's an exception where the stage requires a specific weapon to take down the boss: The T-X Flametank from the "Destruction Target" of Stage 2. Since it uses crossed flamethrowers and spread bullets to protect itself, trying to take it down with Bomb I or III is suicide, forcing you to pick and upgrade the Type II for its long range capability.
Those monster birds have to die if we want "Peace on Earth".
The game has two endings, but its very easy to avoid the bad ending: The last mission will require you to destroy all the stationed TU-190 "Flying Murder" aircraft. Sounds like an easy task, but keep in mind, your enemies will be former ground bosses (mostly from the first stage) with new attack patterns. But there's no other way around in this mission. Fail on destroying one of them will result in the USSR firing its nukes in US territory.
Bozhe Moi! There's still more work to do, I guess.
After taking down the TU-190's, you will return to the carrier as the hero who prevented World War III from happening. But guess what? The USSR wasn't defeated at all. Looks like the Operations Planning Manager forgot the fact that Soviet Russia was a giant country and what you did was only a scratch. Well, to put it simple, this is one of those shmups that loops forever until you're out of credits rather than giving you an ending, you'll be stucked in an endless loop that can only be broken by your inevitable death.
Let's see how far we can go in this battle.
NMK/UPL games doesn't get enough luck and love to be ported on consoles. Task Force Harrier was among the lucky few on arriving at home as Task Force Harrier EX by Treco (A.K.A. American Treco), a subsidiary of Sammy who also released SNK's Street Smart. As a console port, the screen resolution is quite odd, as the screen has a black space on the top where the score and life stock is indicated rather than covering the whole screen. While this works quite well on Castlevania, it looks strange on a shmup, and mostly when it's a coin-up conversion. The 2-Player mode is also gone, killing the concept of an arcade game (I call this the "Final Fight SNES Flaw" or "U.N. Squadron SNES Flaw" due to the same problem of their SNES' ports). But on the bright side, it adds a new opening cutscene, new bosses, briefings in-between levels and improved ending sequences. Unlike the arcade, the side small ships formation can be adjusted for frontal and rear protection and you're granted a special bomb giving you a better defense. The voice samples are very clear and doesn't sound too much digitized, mostly the "Direct hit. Target destroyed" one along with the stage clear fanfare which sounds almost like a redbook/CD based game, proving the Genesis could bring great audio quality when its done right. In a twist of making a promotional stunt, Treco threw a free subscription to EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) on each copy of the game, it was pretty much like the Kaneko glove offer on Air Buster.
As usual with most of NMK/UPL games, it was destiny to be buried and forgotten by time as the companies died out and they got stuck on legal limbo until Hamster picked'em up and released this game as part of Arcade Archives, where we've finally got the arcade perfect port of the game respecting the original gameplay mechanics and the authentic arcade graphics and sounds. It took decades to get an arcade perfect release, but it's finally here.
The heavy cavalry has arrived.
For a game released two years before Thunder Dragon, NMK did a much better job here as the graphics are more alive and "clean" than those of Thunder Dragon, and almost as great as USAAF Mustang, minus the parallax scrolling of course. There's some attention to small details. During the Destruction Target levels, your enemies will be not just vehicles, but armed soldiers which die in a splash of blood rather than the fall-to-the-floor and die. A bloody mess is quite realistic since we're talking about a man torn to shreds by the vulcan artillery of a jet, something far more destructive than a gun.
Like most shmups of the 80's, the common theme was "Modern Military" where your aircraft was the fictional Harrier V and your enemy is clearly the Soviet Union in pure "Cold War" context, and you can notice that on both the enemies AND the scenery, as there's levels where you fight on ice covered lands (Siberia), the Russian architecture and your enemies are assorted USSR war machines such as the MiG-21 Fishbed, Yak-38 Forger, Hind helicopters, Ilyushin cargo planes, Uralvagonzavod T-90M tanks, the stationed MiG-29 Fulcrums in the final stage along with original designs that borrow influences from Soviet vehicles like the MiG-25-inspired aircraft, the TU-160-TU-22 mixed bomber, the oversized Hind-esque helicopter as the first boss and the flying wing like bomber with both green and white designs with the red star used by the Soviets back then. Curiously, Hamster's description on the Arcade Archives website and the in-game manual calls the antagonists "Old Faction". ¿Why saying "Soviet Union" is so taboo? The enemy's identity is more than obvious when you can see the "Hammer and Sickle" in the Destruction Target segment of Stage 2. The Genesis port also omits the "SU-Words" calling the enemy "An underground group of radical communists".
The game not just uses the Harrier in the game, during the cutscenes we can see more American aircraft like the F-15C Eagle, A-10A Thunderbolt II and the B-2 Spirit obviously used without any license from BAE Systems, Boeing and Northrop-Grumman. Well, back then aircraft manufacturers weren't the corporate divas we know today and any game can use the jets without needing to license things. Hope Hamster's not asked to pull the game because of this.
The music of this game is action pounding despite using more synthesized beeps than attempting to sound like an instrument. In Stage 1-1 the music sounds like a repetitive noise, but that changes in level 1-2. The "Destruction Target" cutscene has a fast hard-rocking pace as if UPL was trying to pull a Tecno Soft/Thunder Force, meaning that UPL could do a great job with the music. Stage 2 feels like a prequel of Tragedy Flame from Raiden II/Raiden DX as it has this adventurous-epic fanfare that sounds like a call to the ultimate aerial adventure. Basically this was NMK doing an effort, something that we would never see again from them until Thunder Dragon 2. Speaking of Thunder Dragon, Task Force Harrier features voice samples which sound much clearer than NMK's Raiden clone.
TRIVIA FORCE HARRIER
We know, Treco was in the Danger Zone with the game description.
- The back of the package of the Genesis Harrier EX features a couple of puns to Top Gun: Top Gunnin' and "think and you're history" which is a censored version of Maverick's quote "If you think, you're dead".
- This shmup was among the few games that had a promotional content (the free EGM subscription).
- The Instruction card calls the BI weapon as "ノーマル 弾" (Nomaru Dan), "Dan" means Shot, Bullet, Pellet or Shell.
- Rather than "S-Up" (Shot Up), the Normal Shot item is written as "Sup".
- The "Unblinking" enemy problem will be carried on another NMK shmup: Thunder Dragon.
- Killing infantry with your ship will also be repurposed by NMK on Gunnail.
- "TU" stands for Tupolev, a Soviet/Russian aircraft manufacturer which is now part of the UAC (United Aircraft Corporation) along with Ilyushin (IL), Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG), Yakolev (Yak), and Sukhoi (SU).
- Uralvagonzavod (UVZ) means "Ural Wagon Factory", it is the largest tank manufacturer in the world.
- The "FST" in the FST-1 means "Fire Support Team". Curiously, for a Soviet/Russian unit, the acronym is used by the British Army for their unit resposible on providing artillery fire and close air support.
- Although it is associated with Communism and considered a hate symbol, the Soviet "Hammer and Sickle" emblem originally represented the solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers.
- The Arcade Archives release is the second home port of the game and the first Arcade-perfect port overall.
- Like USAAF Mustang, the Arcade Archives release of Task Force Harrier credits UPL instead of NMK.
THE MYSTERIOUS SOVIET STEALTH FROM STAGE 3
The Russian YF-23? Not at all.
- In Stage 3, one of the enemies will be a black stealth jet resembling the YF-23 Black Widow. It actually is the MiG-37B "Ferret-E", a fictional soviet equivalent of the real F-117 Nighthawk, but mostly, the counter to the also fictional american F-19.
- How fictional was the MiG-37B (and the F-19)?, Well, it was a mere idea of the plastic model manufacturer Testors/Italeri.
- For a stealth jet, the MiG-37B lacked of a launch bar on its landing gear, making it useless as carrier-based aircraft since it could not use the carrier catapults (unless they consider the idea of positioning the aircraft at the back of the carrier's deck).
- While the concept of stealth aircraft was unknown in reality, the book Stealth Warplanes by Doug Richardson mentioned "concepts" of Soviet stealth aircraft like the MiG-2000 and the MiG-37B.
- One of the first real stealth aircraft was the Mikoyan Project 1.44 "Flatpack" (known as MFI Project) which was cancelled by postponements and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- The MFI was cancelled and replaced with the PAK FA program, which was the first successful Russian stealth program, resulting in the Sukhoi Su-57.
- MFI means "Mnogofunksionalni Frontovoy Istrebitel" which means "Multifunctional Frontline Fighter".
Just another mission to do.
Nothing short of poetry.
Task Force Harrier might look like an average arcade shooter and even more basic than Thunder Dragon, it is more appealing in terms of visuals and sounds and believe it or not, is fun and challenging, something that XX Mission failed before.
The only question is: Are you up to the challenge and hop into the Harrier and fight a "One Man's Battle" against the Soviet Union?
The usual positive result on the Eda Scale.