THE OLD SHMUP TESTAMENT (PART III: TO THE MOON AND BACK)
Looks like the Arcade Archives is quite active in terms of shmup re-releases.
This time, is another Nichibutsu shmup, one of their early years: Moon Shuttle.
She's saying: "And I would fly you to the moon and back
If you'll be, if you'll be my baby.
Got a ticket for a world where we belong, so would you be my baby?"
Ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh
The first thing you will be facing in this game is a wall of asteroids known as the Meteor Storm and the objective is simple: Make your way through the asteroid wall by destroying asteroids and making your path as wide as possible since the wall is divided in eight smaller belts which at first will be almost static since the first seven belts move a few pixels each 5-10 seconds and only the last one on the right will begin to move slightly faster than the rest, and you've better be fast because your ship will automatically move to the right but you can increase its speed by pressing right. In a "Lucky Guess" twist, there's rockets randomly placed within the asteroids and if you can find and hit one, you'll get an extra Moon Shuttle. The only way to confirm you got the disguised enemy is that the asteroid will make a "Ting!" sound when it gets hit instead of the explosion sound like the rest.
The deadly pairs
Whether you cleared the first Meteor Storm or died on it, you'll be on the next phase of the game: Bomb Launchers. While the name might imply they will throw the spheric bombs to you, they just move in curved trajectories like the Galaxians and unlike them, the Bomb Launchers rarely shoot at you, relying on evasion more than offensive making them tricky to hit. While they look tough, actually you'll be facing them in groups of two enemies on-screen. After surviving the wave of Bomb Launchers, you'll be on the second Meteor Storm which will increase its movement speed and the last two "belts" will begin to move "desynchronized" from the rest, making them more dangerous and requiring fast action from the player.
Faster and Harder to hit.
You've never seen anything like it.
After clearing the second Meteor Storm the game will throw you one of the most annyoing enemies in the game: Expandos. These are very thin enemies that will spread their wings for a second and then resume their fast movements as thin enemies, making them extremely hard to hit, resulting on escaping enemies and unlike the Bomb Launchers, Expandos won't hesitate on shooting at you and appearing in larger numbers. You can be facing up to six of then on-screen. Once you make it out alive, you'll be on the third Meteor Storm where now four of the eight belts are in different movement, making them much more harder to navigate.
The "Metroid Shooter" Nintendo never gave you.
Once you've completed the third Meteor Storm sequence, you'll be fighting against these Metroid-like creatures known as Man-O-Wars which are less erractic in movement, but they're more aggressive as their 4 shots on screen firing rate is higher than the Expandos or the Bomb Launchers. The flight trajectory of the Man-O-Wars is vertical based as they go up and down they slightly move to the left kinda like the Space Invaders, so you can predict their moves and take down more of them with more ease than before. Once you take care of the "Flying Metroids", you'll be entering the fourth Meteor Storm, now six of the eight belts will be in constant movement and faster than before. Good Luck with that.
Looks like a fuzzy mess is approaching.
The final part of the game is to engage in combat against this fur-like things called "Blob Man" which are the "boss" of the game. Their impredictability don't relies on shooting, but on its fast, circular flight paths and to make things worse they will split into smaller Blob Men when they're shot, making them prone to collide with you. Also, they're backed up by missile-like ships known as Comrades that will fire at you. Don't be surprised if you go down in this part of the game, but if you're good enough to survive and finish it, the game will loop from the first meteor storm which will be in full motion on all the eight smaller belts that comprises it. The only difference is that your congratulatory message after clearing a Meteor Storm sequence; starting from "So So" to "Good" and finally "Right On!"
While the game lacks of continues like all the early 80's arcade games, Nichibutsu made a player continuing move by granting you the ability of adding more lives by adding another coin. As the coin is received by the machine, it adds three Moon Shuttles to the stock. More "Spare lives" means you can keep going as long as you have the quarters (and willpower) to do so. What makes Moon Shuttle much difficult than it should be is the ship's main weapon, a simple 1 way shot, which while it worked on Moon Cresta, Space Invaders and Galaxian, in Moon Shuttle was more than clear that the game needed more firepower especially in the Blob Man segments, something that would equal both player and AI powers in the challenge factor of the game.
Four decades later, we had a console release.
In terms of home porting, while it lacked of console ports, it did had computer ports. First off is the computer that asked you if you're keeping up with it because it is keeping up with you. Yeah, I'm talking the Commodore 64 which had a port of Moon Shuttle by Datasoft. For some reason it switched the horizontal scrolling game into a vertical scroller. While it keeps most of the sprite animations as arcade-accurate as possible within the C64's limitations the colors and sounds are different and the voice samples are gone (odd for the Commodore which was capable for that on Nemesis and Turrican which was an accomplishment for an economic, but powerful computer), but it is much easier than the arcade. The "Blob Man" enemies are slower and you can avoid the collisions with them very easily. The Atari 8-Bit family version also switches the horizontality in favor of a more Galaxian-esque vertical scrolling, but graphically and sound it lacks the capabilities of the Commodore 64, the ship is a single colored sprite that look like a reject of the Atari 2600, while the enemies were more luckier as they can be easily recognized as the enemies of the arcade game.
The Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer (or "CoCo" for short) also had a port as well. While Datasoft switched the game to vertical scrolling on the Commodore and Atari 8-Bit, the Color Computer version is horizontal just like the arcade and retains most of the animations of the game like the rocket exhaust effect. The gameplay is even slower than the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-Bit versions and for some weird reason, the game utilizes the song "The Ride of the Valkyries" before starting the game (Yeah, the Apocalypse Now theme) which goes a bit astray from the concept of arcade faithfulness, also it makes a Robotron-like sound everytime you clear the Meteor Storm segments. After those releases, Nichibutsu and later Hamster never mentioned this game again and became an unnecessary dinosaur to be buried and forgotten, until October 3rd when Hamster decided to bring it back for Arcade Archives, which finally has the Arcade-perfect release that deserved since the days of the NES.
A Pizza Planet® Company
Graphically, Nichibutsu did a revolutionary work, even on its first years in the arcade business. Starting off with the logo on the attract mode. While Namco, Konami and Taito made single colored logos or relied on the in-game font to write the title, Nichibutsu made an elaborated logo with the color palette of the game. This attention to details was also noticed on the sprite work, not just on the asteroids and enemies, but on the Moon Shuttle itself. During the Meteor Storm segments, the Shuttle will roll with a very nice animation, giving it three dimensionality despite being a simplistic 2D sprite. Each enemy has its own explosion animations. Bomb Launchers blow up in a large blast, Expandos have small explosions and Man-O-Wars die leaving an electric shock effect when they're hit. Blob Men makes a "pop" effect when they die, so we have a varied sequence of effects in the game. The starry sky is a virtually the same of Galaxian and Moon Cresta, only in an horizontal scroll. In sound department, it had this weird wail-buzzing during the Meteor Storm segments, but what makes Moon Shuttle stand one step ahead of other early 80's arcade was the voice samples. "Good work", "Hang in there" and the "Oh!" from the defeated Blob Man might be just three voice samples, but we're talking 1981 when voiced games were an unimagined idea or something expensive. So we can say Nichibutsu was a company whose quality literally speaks by itself.
TRIVIA SHUTTLE
- Along with Nichibutsu USA, Taito distributed the game in the US.
- In the Nichibutsu USA arcade flyer, Blob Man was called the "Prince of Darkness", while Taito's flyer called it "Plasma Jack".
- Taito gave alternate names to the rest of the enemies: Bomb Launcher > Centron, Man-O-War > Electric Jelly.
- Only the Comrade retained its name, but it is also possible that "Reton" is its alternate Taito-given name.
- Americana also released the Commodore 64 version along with Datasoft.
- The idea of getting extra lives by simply adding a coin was reused by Sega on After Burner, After Burner II and Space Harrier.
- Like Magmax's Babylon, it is unknown if Blob Men and its henchmen are related to Mandler and Mega Zofer.
- The Arcade Archives release is the first console port in several aspects, it is the first Nintendo and PlayStation port of the game and the first arcade perfect port at home.
Got a ticket for a world where we belong
So would you be my baby?" Yeah!
Overall, Arcade Archives: Moon Shuttle is a trip to the early days of Nichibutsu's experimentation with the Galaxian engine but they added too much features which turned out to be more difficult than necessary as they didn't addresed the difficulty curves that came with them, but it still retains its old school charm for those who want to try something different from the classic Galaga and Galaxian.
Unless you're a Nichibutsu fan or you're after very vintage arcade shootouts, then Moon Shuttle will be a nice pick up for your collection.
The Eda Scale implies "If you are after old-man age games, pick it".