Pong and Beyond

286th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1987
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

Some games (I’m sorry to say) are just too difficult to really describe for these introductions. 1943 (: the Battle of Midway) is one of those. It is a vertical scrolling manic shooter. You’re an American shooting down Japanese planes and ships in the actual WWII Battle of Midway.

Ka-Boom?

Our Thoughts

To be honest, the above explains quite a bit about the game already. The basics are all there – move your plane around, shoot things, use power-ups to shoot them better or in a different fashion. Enemies fly in in different patterns and you have to anticipate. There’s stationary enemies.

This works well enough and is combined to form some difficult levels. Enemies spawn constantly and it seems difficult to be able to destroy them all. The best place where it combines them all are the boss levels – an awesome combination of ground-based turrets that you need to destroy and more mobile enemies that fly at you to distract you.

The goal here isn’t to destroy everything (say, a large plane carrier). In fact, you won’t necessarily get the chance. You fly past the ships and need to damage it as much as possible. If you do, you go on to the next level. If not, you get to restart the level, trying again to do enough damage (and bring down the ship).

It’s a nice way to put some added stakes into completing the level (if you can’t face the boss, the game will eat up plenty of credits) and the slightly different structure makes the boss fights more interesting – you can just feel the hope sinking as complete parts of the ship drift away under you.

It’s not the most innovative of games, but what it does, it does well. That’s all it really sets out to be.

Final Thoughts

I can’t claim there’s too much into this game not seen elsewhere, but this game probably exemplifies the game and shows its peak of this age. Others have added more, but this game feels solid all the way through – controls, difficulty and graphics are good enough to combine into a very playable and fun game.

The fact that this game is very creatively named sequel to 1942 again probably means something but… to be honest it isn’t the most interesting manic shooter once you have played the likes of DoDonPachi.