Time Soldiers (Arcade, SMS, Famicom/NES, Alpha Denshi, 1987)

[Randorama]

I am not a fan of Kusoge games but I may have a lower bar than the average player, when it comes to video-ludic appreciation. I grew playing arcade games and sometimes I became attracted to less-than-stellar titles. Alpha Denshi (and later ADK) created Time Soldiers in 1987 and then went on to produce several other games featuring time travel as the main plot device. The game received a wide array of ports (e.g. S(uper)M(aster)S(ystem), Famicom/NES), but seems absent from modern catalogues. The many revisions of the game differ in the OST’s quality but also in various minor details such as enemy placement and H(it)P(oint)s. A longer version including my rants about this game is here. This version is 2191 words long, or 5.5 pages in times new roman, size 12, single space, in case you wonder. Onwards we go:

Time Soldiers (Alpha Denshi, 1987) is a top-down action/shmup hybrid game (i.e. a vertically freely scrolling shmup) with a rotary joystick and pioneering Alpha Denshi’s obsession with time travel-based plots. Players take control of “Red” and “Blue”, two nameless warriors from a far, post-apocalyptic future who must save their comrades stranded in time after an attack by their rival army. Players can move in eight directions but also rotate their Red and Face so that their shots may face a different direction from their moving line. Red and Blue thus cross five time periods rife with war and rescue their comrades, before heading to their home temporal zone and defeating the enemy one final time. Though far from a perfect game, Time Soldiers provides an interesting take on the short-lived micro-genre of “rotato” (i.e. rotary joystick-based) shmups. My goal in this review is to explain why this is the case.

By this point in our journey into arcade games, you might start having a better picture of 1987 as a great game for the field. My reviews and squibs might not be as clear and cohesive as a single article discussing the year and releases in accurate detail, I concede. For this review, however, I want to zoom into the mini-milieu/context/Zeitgeist of “rotary” (or “rotato”) games, a short-lived genre centring on a hardware innovation. Rotary games use a joystick that allows movement in eight direction and rotation of the character via rotation of the joystick, usually via 45° or 22.5° rotations (i.e. 8 angles, or 16 angles in some titles). I believe that SNK’s Guevara and this title pioneered the concept, Data East’s Heavy Barrel and Midnight Resistance pilfered it; Capcom’s Forgotten/Lost Worlds and Seta’s Caliber 50 are other examples. SNK’s SAR in 1989 seems the last micro-genre’s release.

Rotary/rotato games seem to anticipate modern twin-stick games (e.g. latter ports of Under Defeat). They also seem to partly evolve from dial-control games (e.g. breakout genre titles like Taito’s Arkanoid, Atari’s unique shmup series Asteroids). Time Soldiers’s approach to this micro-genre is interesting because of how it combines with the game mechanics in some nuanced ways. First, however, we offer an overview of the plot. Red and Blue are two warriors from a far, post-apocalyptic future that must rescue their comrades, stranded in time by the evil “Gylend” army. They must travel to five war zones from diverse time epochs and rescue one of their comrades (“World War III”, “Imperial Rome”, “Primitive Age”, “Sengoku Era”, and “30th century”). Once Red and Blue return to their bleak and derelict era, they must vanquish Gylend and its underlings, to save their sixth and last comrade.

Alpha Denshi recycled this idea in many of their future titles, e.g. the World Heroes series on Neo Geo. In this title, the plot device allowed designers to pit players against historically different types of warriors, with some fantastic licenses to embellish the result. Let us focus on the mechanics, before we discuss these design choices. Players control Red and Blue via the joystick: they can move the characters in eight directions and rotate their orientations by 30° per rotation. Red and Blue can thus walk in one linear direction but shoot in any other angular direction, often looking like they are striking fancy poses to kill enemies. The A button controls the main shot, and requires frenetic tapping because the main shots are quite weak. The B button controls the secondary attacks: laser, missile, and wide shot. Each secondary shot can reach level 3 power via two consecutive power-ups.

Red and Blue can use the secondary attacks as far as their “energy bar” is not empty. If players collect a new item of the same type when the bar is not full (e.g. missile), the bar will refill and the weapon will upgrade if possible. If they switch secondary attack (e.g. from missile to laser), the power level resets but the energy bar refills nevertheless. Players can also collect a “P” icon that transforms Red and Blue into Hulk-like or Kenshiro-like muscular giants. They acquire a much faster automatic shot with a longer attacking range, increase the damage level of their secondary attacks, and develop partial invulnerability to attacks. Each hit they take depletes the secondary attack energy bar, and once the bar is empty, they revert to normal form. A single hit kills them, in this form; instead, their hulk form may easily take dozens of hits.

The secondary attacks can thus double as sources for extra HPs when in Hulk/Kenshiro forms. Players can thus consume energy when using these attacks or when Red are Blue receive a hit; taking any secondary attack icon however refills the bar in full. Interestingly, secondary attacks have one more function that involves the limited use of the vertical axis. The game offers a top-down view. However, some enemies are located on elevated parts of the game field and can only receive damage via the missile secondary attack. The laser, wide shot or main shot attacks may reach only those enemies that are on elevated surfaces by adjacent to the player’s plane. P icons are scarce, and the use of the main shot can handle most enemies aside elevated strikers. Players may thus aim to use secondary attacks when in Hulk/Kenshiro form and always refill the energy bar to gain HPs.

The game’s plot interweaves with the game mechanics and Stage structure in a distinctive manner. It is useful to explain this Facet of the game both as a game mechanic and source of difficulty, and to start using this consuetudinary term by this point already. Each time epoch consists of three stages that players can loop indefinitely. Once players clear Stage three of the “World War III” epoch, they loop from Stage one. After clearing each Stage, players can either continue or Warp into another epoch. When the “epoch counter” at the centre of the screen flashes, they are in the right time epoch to save their next comrade. Players must clear the “World War III” “Imperial Rome” and “Primitive Age” epochs first. They will move to the “Sengoku Era” and “30th century” epochs, and then to their original epoch last, before they can clear the game.

The game system is thus slightly sophisticated and yet relatively simple. The audio and visual Facets are possibly the weakest parts of the game, alas. The game has a certain visual identity that combines two interesting concepts: enemies from distinct historical periods and a certain 1980s manga/anime style. The elaboration of these concepts is not exactly stellar, alas. The problems with the visual amount to two factors. First, the game has a few templates for recurring enemies in each epoch. Their animations and attacking patterns are mostly identical: only their appearance changes in each epoch. Bosses also follow the same few templates, with the “Sengoku Era” and “30th Century” repeating the same boss on each stage. Second, backgrounds tend to be drab and design simplistically, with little detail on most stages. In other words, the game tends to look plain, if not on the ugly side.

The OST deserves some specific considerations, as well. In my experience, the MAME versions still do not emulate the OST correctly, as they sound “under-sampled”, for a lack of a more precise word. The various themes nevertheless amount to plain arcade music vaguely trying to evoke the atmosphere of each battle epoch. For instance, “World War III”’s theme sounds like a vaguely dramatic war fanfare; “30th century” theme attempts to have a techno-futuristic vibe. The problem is that explosion and shooting sound effects are loud, and Red and Blue’s sampled death screams are so loud that people may turn and wonder who died in a grisly manner, in arcades. The boss battle has its own fast-paced, dramatic charm at least. Overall, though, the game can get at most a “pass” in the presentation Facets, even if the quality is decent enough that players can focus on the action.

The topic of difficulty that I address next may require a subtle positioning of the game. I believe that the game’s design is simple enough that game mechanics and Stages design/layout qualify as the two key Facets of difficulty. Game mechanics involve the rotary controls; Stages design includes two Facets that deserve some further elaboration. Game mechanics include easily mastered Facets (movement, shot, secondary attack) and Facets that require mastering (rotation mechanics, “Hulk” power-up, tactical use of the secondary attacks). Players can kill most enemies with the standard shot and use the missile secondary attack to kill enemies on elevated surfaces. Rotation mechanics are trickier, however: players must simply learn how to rotate Red and Blue to obtain optimal attacking angles, especially if barriers or obstacles are in the way. This Facet ultimately takes time for its mastery: rotary joysticks and characters were a fleeting trend, not a stable mechanic.

The “Hulk” power-up is trickier. When Red and Blue transform, they gain a source of HP(s) that can make the game much easier to handle. Players may however refrain from using the secondary attack to keep their energy levels high. Energy starts draining in “Hulk” form, and using the secondary attack speeds up this process considerably. Players may simply collect all secondary weapon power-ups and use secondary attacks on the fly, or avoid hits and play conservatively while using a bigger sprite. In this form, players must therefore be wise in using secondary attacks: they can focus on only killing enemies on elevations with these weapons. Once players can master these three Facets, however, they should have developed a tight control of the game’s mechanics: this is why I award a measly 3/25 difficulty points to this Facet. With some practice, they should be easy to handle.

The Stage design Facets that shape the game’s difficulty require the aforementioned elaboration due to some of them having a slightly unintuitive design. Let us start with the intuitive Facets, first. Each epoch and its three looping stages have sections that scroll sideways and that may present layout challenges, usually via enemies in elevated spots. Players must thus learn how to navigate these layouts and how to attack and kill all the enemies. Slow progression is useful (players control the scrolling, most of the time), but in some cases the game will switch to auto-scrolling. Be sure to know how to handle these sections. Although players can 1-CC the game without using secondary attacks and by de-spawning enemies on elevations, having a first grasp of stages’ obstacles, sections’ scrolling direction, and structure seems necessary. Each epoch and triptych of Stages presents its own environmental hazards.

Once players master the six epochs’ layouts, they should also learn guardian bosses’ battles. Each epoch has a “guardian boss”, i.e. a boss appearing after a Stage boss and releasing a comrade after its demise. These bosses recycle the same attack pattern except for the “Imperial Rome” guardian boss; players must nevertheless master this attack and the specific stage layout of the zones in which they appear. Players must then learn the warp gates paths, i.e. the Stages and epochs to which each gate conducts. For instance, the gate after Stage one of the “World War III” epoch takes Red and Blue to Stage two of “the Primitive age”. Players can follow the shortest path and use warps so that they only visit each Stage once. Be careful: this entails that players may only get the semi-random “P” power up once, during a credit.

Longer paths avoid this problem: players may obtain the “P” power-up multiple time. These paths have a drawback: if players repeat a stage, the simple rank system will increase the Stage’s difficulty to “hard” and then to “hardest”. Players can thus decide which path to use to stock up or renew power-ups and secondary attacks. There are only two extends at 100k and 400k, so there is a merit in levelling up secondary attacks or renewing the “Hulk” form. However, the longer the path, the more difficult the game will be. We thus have ten Facets forming the difficulty value of the Stage layout Facet. 10/25 and 3/25 points give us 13/50 total points: Time Soldier is a low-tier game for intermediate players, in my view. Once players get a grasp of the rotatory mechanism and develop a good path to the final boss, a 1-CC should be feasible.

Let us wrap up. Time Soldiers is a shmup/run’n gun hybrid game from Alpha Denshi, released in 1987. Two soldiers from the far future, Red and Blue, must rescue their comrades after they end up stranded in time by their arch-nemesis Gylend. Red and Blue thus traverse six different historical epochs of war and strife to rescue these comrades and vanquish Gylend a final time. Time Soldiers is notable because it belongs to the micro-genre of “rotary/rotational” joystick games, has a non-linear stage structure based on the time travel concept and looks somewhat plain. The game can however be an affordable 1-CC, and an interesting way to discover this micro-genre that was ahead of its time, design-wise. Go and play it, also because Alpha Denshi was another flawed but lovable arcade games company.