IF JUNO IS FIRST, THE PLAYER IS HERE FOR SECONDS
Konami brings back an 80's obscurity.
Gif by BIL
This time Konami surprised Arcade Archives fans with this one, the old and obscure perspective shmup Juno First.
Electronic Battlefield Grid
Before Yu-Gi-Oh!, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, X-Men, Gradius, Contra and even Time Pilot, there was this game. At first Juno First seems to be a clone of Nintendo's Radar Scope. But unlike Nintendo's fixed shooter, Juno First gives you the ability to go after the enemies in full pursuit, as well as retreat from enemy attacks. One of the things that I've noticed is the feel of inertia when you move from left to right, as it moves the ship will descend due to deceleration. Learning and getting used to this is required in this game in order to avoid unwanted collisions. Despite the disadvantages of inertia you have three things in favor. The first one is your rapid firing ship with a rate of 5 fast firing bullets on screen which give you a well provided firepower for an early 80's shmup, breaking with the norm of one or three per-screen. The objective in this game is to clear the screen of enemies before the time runs out. That's why you're given the ability to move up and down, because you're not just gonna evade fast enemies, but also homing bullets. But there's times that manuevering is not enough and that's where the game gives you the second thing in favor which is a special skill: Warp. Warp is the teleport of the game which basically disappears for a few seconds and then reappear, giving you a small breath of air and destroying the bullets, acting like a "semi-bomb". Keep in mind, you can only use the warp three times.
Blasted AND Fried.
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The third and last one is a hidden, experts only technique which requires to use your thrusters to destroy enemies with the exhaust flame. Yeah, you can use something unexpected like the engines to destroy your enemies. For an early 80's game, this was an unexpected move that many players forgot it existed. I'm sure that not even back then was noticed.
He said he was asking for a ride back to the Orion System.
While the game lacks of items to power you up, it does have one item in particular; a "Humanoid" which looks like a small astronaut. To make it appear, you have to destroy a "Spherical" enemy in order to free the captured Humanoid, then you can pick him up.
Hyperspeed, Hyperbonus System.
Picking a Humanoid (or "Alien" according to the Arcade Archives manual) will make your ship enter in Hyperspace, indicated by the black screen turning red. During a short while (10 seconds or so) the score value of the enemies will increase on each enemy you take down. This is the key to increase your high score and you're gonna need it because if you want an extra life you'll have to reach 100,000 points, which is not an easy task.
Homeporting at Hyperspeed velocity.
Believe it or not, Juno First had a limited amount of homeports, but the official ports were for home computers since it only had 1 unofficial console port. The first port is the Commodore 64. Looks like Konami kept it up with the computer that "is keeping up with you" and for the economic, yet powerful Commodore 64, it made a reasonable port since DataSoft, mostly Greg Hiscott managed to keep the angle effects on the perspective as the ship moves along with the explosion effects, just slightly simplified to make it fit with the Commodore's limitations. The only flaw with this version is the slow controls which are unresponsive (a failed attempt to recreate the inertia of the original) and to make things worse, the hit detection is bad, making the game more unnecessary hard. But there's even worse; the MSX version developed by Sony (yeah, the Trinitron and PlayStation guys) is much more difficult since enemy bullets are faster and lacks of sense of movement, but at least tries to recreate the field effect of the game. The unofficial Atari 2600 port by Atari Age was made by an user who exploited the potential of the 2600 much better than any of Atari's developers from that time. It has a title screen, cool music, and despite the lack of the field effect which was replaced with horizontal lines, it plays much better than the official Commodore and MSX ports which were supposed to be more capable than the Atari. As an added homebrew extra bonus, if you have an AtariBox/AtariVox+ the game will play voice samples. The only official Atari port was on the Atari 800 computer by Datasoft/Greg Hiscott is pretty much the same as the Commodore version, the only difference is that the controls are better this time. It never got an official console release until 42 years later when Konami and Hamster released Juno First as part of Arcade Archives for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStations 4 and 5, and well, better late than never. This port is arcade perfect and adds the Hi Score and Caravan Modes along with the Trophy support for the PlayStation versions. The Arcade Archives release is based on the Japanese Konami version, ditching the American release by Gottlieb and the one by Mylstar Electronics. The only difference between localization was that the Japanese version had the disclaimer "© Konami 1983" while the Gottlieb one says "©1983 KONAMI INDUSTRY CO., LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED D. GOTTLIEB AND COMPANY., LICENSEE". Typical from Arcade Archives, it carries the No continues Hi-Score Mode and the 5 minutes limited Caravan Mode for Star Soldier fans, along with the trophy support for PlayStation 4|5 owners (Sucks to own a Switch, I guess).
Gone in a High Energy blast.
For a 1983 game it manages to bring some great visuals despite using dots for the background. You can see how the "lines" began to tilt on an angle as you move from one side to another giving a three dimensional rotation effect. The speed effect as you accelerate is also impressive as well along with the simulated scaling of the enemies, For a game that didn't had too much technology it really manages to "Do more with less".
Less dots, same sense of movement unaffected.
If you are skillful enough to reach stage 9, you'll notice that the number of dots on screen was reduced, but still manages to give the depth and movement effect.
Although it only has one short tune for music, it has sound effects for the laser and space sounds. Back then the music was "provided" by the stereos in the Arcade, being the song "Video Games (Gets in your brain)" by Alien the best example of them. Just play the song in your favorite media player and you're all set.
JUNO FIRST, CURIOSITIES SECOND
- Activision's Beamrider is similar to Juno First.
- 51st Konami title in the Arcade Archives library.
- Fifth overall coin-up conversion
- First official console port of the game.
- First Arcade-Perfect port.
- The perspective effect can be considered a very early predecessor of Axelay's "vertical" stages.
Just another Vintage Arcade night.
Juno First is an interesting experiment of old times when arcade was always trying to innovate rather than being a copy of something, giving us a curious and very modern idea that cemented some of the future aspects of shooting and overall gaming.
In the R-Scale, it manages to get a total of 8 R-9's out of 10:
Arcade fun is all what the Eda Scale needs to be on the positives.