Thundercade (Arcade, FC, other formats, Seta/Taito, 1987).

[Randorama]

This is an edited version of the squib I wrote for Taito's/Sega's Thundercade, which you can find here. This review aims to present the game's finer details, but lacks the rather subjective musings and experiences that I offer in each squib. Please enjoy, anyway (2441 words, or 6.1 pages in times new roman, size 12, single space; the usual disclaimers apply):


Thundercade (Taito/Seta 1987) is a shmup in which one or two players riding armed motorcycles invade some (foreign?) country to stop some terrorists’ nuclear weapons program. Seta, a now obscure but once relatively prolific arcade games company, created the game and Taito distributed it. The title Twin Formation is for the international market, as the Japanese version’s title is Tokushu Butai U.A.G.. The game features pioneering pre-rendered graphics, a complex sub-weapon system allowing players to shoot forward but also sideways, and a weapon/bomb attack that invites aggressive use for scoring purposes. The game also features gigantic bosses and seamless action: no clear stage breaks exist, even if lulls in action occur after beating bosses. Although the action is at times frantic, the powerful weapons and bombs render the game a potentially easy target for 1-CC endeavours. Players can thus enjoy easy shmup action and perhaps appreciate an old school unpolished gem.

Thundercade was published in a period in which Taito was acting as a distributor/publisher for several minor companies, one famous example being Toaplan. Seta published this title, the rather obscure Arbalester and the quite notorious Twin Eagle under the Taito Aegis. However, the other titles that I am aware of appeared as Seta games. The game is possibly one of the earliest titles featuring a primitive form of pre-rendered graphics, even if this technique seems mostly used on vehicles inspired by real-life machines (e.g. the characters’ motorcycles). It seems that in the 1986–1988 period, auto-fire was a taboo concept for some companies. If players activate any auto-fire rate higher than 20 kHz, the vehicles will not shoot. This or lower frequencies are fine, and turn the game into a rather easy challenge, as I am going to explain in the remainder of this review.

First, however, let me discuss the world setting in some detail. The game’s setting is rather interesting, given the “1980s improbable Hollywood action/war flick”. The game starts with a brief introduction showing an Hercules C-130 look-alike plane hovering at speed over some undefined city outskirts. Terrorists have taken hold of a nuclear plant, somewhere, so the good guys deliver one or two soldiers on motorcycles behind enemies’ lines. The task of these unnamed pilots is to destroy a gargantuan terrorist army while riding through the seemingly immense terrorists’ territory. After crossing cities, deserts, mountains and then finally invading the terrorists’ base, the soldiers blow up the nuclear plant, obviously escape just in time to avoid dying in a radiation bath. Their plane picks them up leisurely, and players can enjoy a final victory screen with the plane flying in the sunset, as freedom prevails.

If my summary the plot gives you the impression that the game’s action rests on rather shaky premises, fear not. As with all shmups, the game’s mechanics are the core of the game and the campiness of plots and settings is a minor and usually zany but, potentially, charming aspect. The game’s mechanics are quite simple, as befits a 1980s title. Tap the A button and the motorcycle will shoot a stream of thin, very weakly destructive bullets. Hold the A button and a slow stream of bullets will start at the measly rate of one bullet per second or so. Auto-fire rates, if they respect the programmers’ constraint, turn this stream into a fast and reliable barrage. When the vehicle power-ups, the central shot disappears: die or lose the power-ups, and the motorcycle will revert to the basic shot.

The B button triggers the special weapon/bomb attack: the aforementioned C-130’s shadow briefly passes over the screen with a loud turbo-engine noise to carpet bomb enemies. The first or basic use of the bomb will release a stream of explosions appearing to the sides of the motorcycle’s vertical line. If the motorcycle is exactly along the vertical centre of the screen, then two streams of explosions will travel from the bottom screen upwards, roughly covering 30% of the screen. A second bomb immediately released after the first bomb will trigger zig-zagging explosions that will however destroy all enemies and background objects on screen, instead. A third consecutive bomb, while strategically unsound, may release a single stream of explosions on the motorcycle’s trajectory or a zig-zagging bomb. The exact form is context-sensitive, so players may not worry about which option will activate. Double bombs can be devastating: use them wisely.

The power ups are perhaps the most interesting part of the game. Every ten seconds or so, a sidecar appears on screen in either military green or mild orange colour. The sidecars carry extra weapons that come into three types of increasing power: 7-millimetre shotguns, 15-millimetre machineguns and 30-millimetre cannons. Shotgun sidecars appear at the very beginning of the game and occur for the whole game; the first machinegun sidecar appears shortly before the first boss. Cannons do not appear until shortly after the third boss: the final power-up is a double-barrelled orange cannon sidecar. Sidecars can include one or two barrels, and can be shoot frontally or sideways. Green sidecars have limited shot range, though the range increases with power level. Ideally, a single motorcycle can have two double-barrelled orange cannons, which cover the whole screen in range: remember that the central shot becomes inactive, however.

The mention of bosses may perhaps have led readers into believing that the game has stages. This is perhaps not incorrect: the game features five huge vehicles acting as bosses of sorts. However, once players defeat those bosses, a few seconds of apparent peace on screen lead to the arrival of new enemies’ waves. Technically, thus, the game only has one long stage with a final boss awaiting players in the terrorist base: the five preceding bosses may act as intermediate bosses. This approach to level design may sound like a daunting proposition if stages were long. However, the whole game lasts roughly 21 minutes if players obtain a 1-CC, and bosses appear at regular intervals. Since the lulls after the boss concede players a bit of respite, the game manages to offer a compact experience and a fast-paced, but balanced pace.

The game’s mechanics thus offer an approach to the experience that was relatively original for the time. The visuals, as we have mentioned in the introduction, also offer a perhaps interesting technical innovation via their pre-rendered style. Enemy vehicles include tanks of various sizes and with differing H(it)P(oint)s, foot soldiers dressing either military green or bright red uniforms, and various other vehicles. Bosses are huge and noisy, and include a giant tank with multiple turrets, a submarine somehow popping out of a relatively small channel, a giant helicopter and…a giant robot crab. Quirky bosses aside, the game’s aesthetics strongly focus on (relatively) realistic mechanic designs, even there are some considerable odd choices involving enemies’ sizes. Foot soldiers seem as big as the dark grey tanks, helicopters seem able to occupy the same location at the same time, and the giant crab…shoots lasers. Realism, 1980s’ style.

The general settings and background also present a mix of pseudo-realistic aspects and some definite oddities. Stages involve different and rather heterogeneous locations: the characters travel from a big city to a military base in a mountainous range, crossing deserts and rugged wastelands. Thus, the game features a lot of drab colours such as dark and light grey, orange, green and a few bluish bodies of water. Notably, most bullets are orange, exceptions being cannon shots and rockets in dark grey. From time to time, spotting bullets may be hard as backgrounds may be in a similar shade. Some passages can also become overcrowded with enemies if players do not clear the screen quickly. Overall, the game has a distinctive visual style that however presents quirky or perhaps just under-designed aspects. For an 1980s military-themed shmup, however, Thundercade has a distinctive if perhaps quixotic visual identity.

A topic that we should touch even if I admit feeling slightly embarrassed about it is the OST and the sound effects. Easily the weakest aspect of the game, the OST sounds like a snippet of non-descript Muzak that apparently loops every two minutes or so. In practice, however, the pseudo-loop involves minor variations near each end of the cycle. Players should thus have the feeling that they are listening to the same soundbite for 20 minutes or so, if they manage to 1-CC the game. More accurately, players will listen to this soundbite until they reach the final boss. A more funky-like soundbite will then start and play during the 30 seconds or so that it takes to destroy this final obstacle. OST-wise, thus, Thundercade offers a modest experience, akin to early 1980s shmups and their often bare-bones “soundtracks” of sorts.

The sound effects also offer a similarly idiosyncratic experience. The three types of sidecar attacks have each their specific sound effects. While the shotguns and the machineguns may sound like their actual counterparts, their sound effects are not particularly invasive. The cannon sidecars, however, feature a loud, squeaky, and rather mysterious sound effect that may become quite irritating after 30 seconds or so. The bomb weapon is interesting, since it seems to sound a brief sample of some plane’s turbo-propeller engines…and then another mysterious sample perhaps simulating a bomb explosion. Other sound effects may be realistic, but several of them may become irksome to the ears, given their loudness and high pitch-ness. It is overall fair to say that Thundercade may not offer the best aural experience among shmups, but players may develop a queer taste for its quirky OST and sound effects, perhaps.

We can now move to the final passages that involve the game itself: those involving the game’s difficulty. I will offer a link to my first discussion of the Facets approach, but a mini introduction to this topic may help new readers to navigate this part. I propose that difficulty in games depends on the game’s aspects or facets that players can access and interact with, when they play. Players may approach games in different manners and thus find aspects/facets of a given game “difficult”, i.e. challenging to grasp, master, and control. For Thundercade, I propose that there are only two facets that contribute to the game’s overall difficulty: the motorcycle’s mechanics and the enemies’ attacking patterns and waves. Players can master each Facet independently, so in my view there are no interacting facets that may affect difficulty; auto-fire and its role deserve its own facet, though.

The motorcycle’s mechanics should be relatively easy to learn and master. The vehicle does not have any special moves, but under certain conditions the motorcycles can jumps obstacles or change planes. For instance, players can destroy the submarine (i.e. the first boss/mid-boss) and then jump over the channel in which the submarine waits. Players simply need to move forward, and the motorcycle will jump, becoming invulnerable to bullets while airborne. If a section is at a different elevation from other sections, some procedure will let the motorcycle land on the detached section. Aside this small detail, players must simply learn which sidecar they prefer using and learn when to use bombs. In my view, a 7/25 points suffices to capture this facet of difficulty.

The other key facet regarding difficulty involves enemy waves and their attacks. As befits old school types of shmups, enemies tend to occur in rigid order and in waves or clusters. Foot soldiers, for instance, appear in small trios or quartets from the top, or single individuals or pairs from the sides. Smaller tanks also follow a similar pattern. Helicopters invariably appear in fixed formations of five or six units (black windshield) or in two consecutive waves of eight units (jet-like model). Each enemy wave follows one or two movement patterns and each enemy shoots via fixed attacking patterns. Players can memorise enemies’ appearance on screen and shoot them down immediately; if enemies can attack, avoiding their often poorly strafing attacks may be trivial. Enemy waves are thus a static facet of the game that is not worth more than 7/25 points of difficulty, as far as I am concerned.

The use of auto-fire acts as a third facet for three reasons. First, the use of auto-fire can increase the “thickness” of the bullet stream in such a way that destroying buildings and other scenery becomes easy if not trivial. Several sections become quite easier to handle once players obliterate scenery: thicker enemy waves can go down faster, without obstacles. Second, if players enter the second boss’ fight (a giant tank) only with the basic shot but quickly destroy this boss, a “laser” power-up will appear. The main shot turns into a free-range piercing laser, and sidecars will also carry with this weapon. Without auto-fire, obtaining the laser is almost impossible as the boss must find their death quickly. The laser may render difficulty trivial, but a decent player using auto-fire will already have an easier time anyway.

Overall, the overall difficulty I propose for the game is 7+7=14/50 points without auto-fire. The use of auto-fire considerably lowers difficulty in my view, it halves it to 7/50 points. The game offers a middle intermediate challenge without auto-fire, but the use of auto-fire lowers it to 7/50 points, to higher beginner levels. Let me also mention that the game offers one extend at 50k points (i.e. very early on in the game), and one extend power-up near the final boss. If players have 777k points and use a bomb, a power-up awarding seven lives will also appear. Thus, exploiting the game’s secrets can make the game easier (perhaps, a 5/50). The Difficulty Wiki offers slightly different scores, but also fewer motivations for the scores; let us just say that we reach similar conclusions via different approaches to difficulty.

In conclusion, Thundercade/Twin Formation is an interesting shmup from Seta that Taito published in 1987, and that features some interesting and innovative mechanics for its time. The game offers an approachable challenge for players who wish to develop their 1-CC skills. Indeed, its difficulty is not high, and the game mechanics provide a (relatively) gentle learning curve. The game may appear and sound rather outdated by these days, but for its time it provides an early if preliminary approach to pre-rendered graphics. Players who love the old school, 1980s style of shmups tinged with some manic aspects should find the game entertaining. All players, however, may enjoy the game as a time capsule or interactive documentary about that period of the history of the genre. Play it with an open mind and a dash of nostalgia on the screen, and you will find merit in the game’s overall experience.