Shooter – Pinkie's Paradise

Cowboys, Giant Robots and a Pink Dame! Pinkie plays Wild Guns

Hear Ye Hear Ye Princess Pinkie has returned with a new gaming post!

Salutations my loyal subjects and island guests. As you might know I love retro games and especially the SNES era of gaming. I have done a fair few reviews in the past! Recently with Covid rules becoming a bit more lentient I have been meeting with a friend to play some cool SNES Co-Op titles using my Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Today I will talk to you about a game we recently beat! A game that is about shouting cowboys and giant robots. Steampunk meets Cyberpunk in the SNES cult classic. Wild Guns!

Clint and Annie’s date at the Saloon

Wild Guns was one of those SNES titles that saw a very diverse release date. Released in Japan in August 1994, the US in July 1995 and finally in Europe due October 30 1996 Wild Arms is a classic game in the very obscure shooting gallery genre. While the game has an incredibly arcade feel Natsume developed and published it exclusively for SNES. It would not be until 2016 and later that a “remaster” was released on anything else but a Nintendo platform. But nowadays a four player variant of this game with new characters and new stages is also available for pc and playstation 4. Of course the updated version is also available on Nintendo Switch. Wild Guns Reloaded is available on steam for around 13 euro. While I would love to play as a dog on a drone (which is an reloaded exclusive character) I will talk about the base game.. because if you pay for Nintendo Switch online it’s free!

I have no idea what the story is of this game! I don’t remember if I skipped it or if I needed a manual to read it .. but in the base game you play Clint .. a gruff classical looking cowboy or Annie a blonde in a pink dress and a fancy hat! Guess which one I insisted on being! Each character comes with four colour variations which also change your crosshair. I played better as Blue Annie then Pink Annie because I lost track of my crosshair less! White Annie I found unplayable.. but that might just be me! The game has 6 stages of which the majority consists of 3 parts. In the end you have to defeat.. some chinese/japanese looking guy. The stages and subsections are pretty varied and most enemies are unique to each stage.. though the classic SNES colour variants show up. The game features 3 difficulties and a versus mode, so there is some replayability.

SNES Longplay [243] Wild Guns (a) - YouTube

My friend and me started at the normal difficulty, which had Clint and Annie already die quite a bit. The first stage is themed after a saloon. With the first part being a shootout against cowboys outside the saloon with enemies shooting at your from windows or behind barrels. It was pretty neat and the cowboy vibe clearly can be felt. The way this game work is basically as follows. The first two subsections of a stage you fight against a clock, you have to survive against an onslaught of enemies until the timer runs out after which you face a mini boss. If you score enough points you can earn more lives , better weapons and screen wiping bombs to make the rest of the stage easier, so you always have to balance how much risk you take killing people versus. Risking how much you want to upgrade versus how much you want to live. Which is easier said then done.. because this game comes at you , guns blazing.

After you have survived against your first wave of cowboys you have to face a giant robot cowboy with machine gun arms which tries to mow you down remorseley. Luckily Clint and Annie have some sort of spider sense and they will tell the player to watch out and make them dodge when projectiles fly their way. In their jump they are also near invisible. If you listen to your character you have a good chance to survive , and with a bit of learning you can take down this first mini boss pretty easily. Clint and Annie beat this stage after only one game over. The second bout of this stage takes place inside the saloon! This one is already a bit more tricky, not only do bullets fly your way, there is also dynamite to deal with. Which limits in what directions you can block. Jumping into an explosion will end up getting you killed and if you do not kill enemies quickly they will keep piling up turning the game into a true bullet hell.

Wild Guns: Reloaded adds an adorable dog who controls a machine-gun drone to its chaotic roster | TechnoBuffalo

It took us two attempts.. but when we found out we can use a Lasso to stun dynamite throwers, while the other would gun them down we cleaned out the saloon and took down the wimpy Miniboss. The final area of this stage put us on the roof of the Saloon where we take down a Mecha equipped with a missile system that rains death from above.. and gatling guns that sweep half the screen. Playing smart we saved up a lot of our bombs which made short work of the boss. Clint and Annie finish their date at the saloon after dying only like 40 times (21 times Annie and 19 times Clint) ! Hey I have been on worse dates!

Crazy Cowboys

Amazon.com: Wild Guns - Nintendo Super NES: Video Games

After this the game lets you pick one of four stages, A goldmine, a train, a canyon and an arms depot. Each stage pits you against a crazy mix of cowboys and robots. Each stage gives you a point total which you can see as bounty for taking down the boss. Not every stage has the same bounty and of course the stages with the higher bounty offer higher difficulty! Yet bounties also go up if you beat a stage, so if you are interested in score there are some tactics to have fun with… for me bullet riddled Annie, we just decided to play the stages from high to low! Only to give on medium difficulty after 4 attempts of desolation canyon. We really wanted to beat the game and play through it and despite having unlimited continues that keep track of which stages you beat, having to do all three subsections of a stage on 3 life each. Now Normal is a doable difficulty but we did not have enough practice time.. and due to the world state we can’t play this as often as we would like.. so we would just try easy mode, hoping the game would not insult us at the end.

It gave us a perfect insight at what difficulty would do. The higher the difficulty the higher the health pool of enemies is and thus how smaller your window to dodge becomes. This will also result in you having more enemies on screen to deal with at the same time, as you can’t kill everyone quick enough to keep your screen rather clear. The higher the difficulty the more likely enemies are to use their special abilities, like drones throwing their own lasso or one of those deaths from above missile barrages. All in all easy was a lot more manageable, though still not very easy. There is a lot on the screen to manage. Powerups, your dodge notifications, enemy placement, the placement of your crosshair and the missiles falling from the sky , powerups and ground traps. Funnily I discovered that me and my friend struggled with different things. He kept getting hit by traps and missiles while I failed to see a notification of a bullet. Which helped us get a flow where we warned each other of one of those.

The single player mode of this game as such is a bit tricky, there is so much happening I am convinced you will always have a weakness and there is no one to polish it out, and it is not as fun either. The action is a bit repetitive, even though all stages offer a pretty diversive, way of approaching things. The mine has enemies as tiny dots in the distance, the train has enemies zipping past and changing positions, the canyon has a lot of enemies that can stun! So each stage is different in how you approach it .. but it is all very samey in it’s pacing, which is why you really need a friend for this. Competing for the higher score is also a lot more fun than getting a highscore in some random list. The set high scores are super easy to beat. We beat the game and already set the high score.. while we actually did pretty terrible. So just beating high scores by yourself would not be fun at all! Maybe if you beat the game once or twice to beat your personal best.. but with how many games we have access to nowadays , no one will do that. So it really is a game for two.

This also helps with the game’s biggest appeal. Finding out what craziness is next. The enemies are really crazy and most bosses are really fun! There is one really boring flame tank thing but there are also some bizarre bosses that are super fun to learn and face. The mid stage bosses are fairly fun as well, though unfortunately these are the ones that are reused the most. In a way there are some similarities with Cowboy Bebop ..but without the break. Think Bebop meet’s Gurren Lagann, while graphically reminding me a bit off Final Fight mixed with Metal Slug. That feeling and craziness is also the biggest appeal. You don’t play this game for the challenge , you might not even play it to beat it every single time you play it for the fun, in a similar way why you play Pacman or Tetriis. There is just something fundamentally fun about this game.

That same appeal is unfortunately also it’s biggest downfall. Because it has that arcade appeal it’s linear/level based setting makes it less repeatable than it’s competitors. Where you can play a Pacman a bit every day, this you will put down for a fair while after you beat it. It feels more like a beat em up with guns. However where Beat Em ups let you play another character that does really play differently as the other, here it doesn’t feel that way. Because you walk on a 2d plain instead of a 2.5d plan your actions are much more set and because enemies target you in specific ways , knowing how they will react will get you past them each time. At least in Beat ‘m ups they will move slightly differently. This makes Wild Guns a perfect game to beat once a year with a friend. I really like this game a lot but I also don’t want to play it again any time soon, maybe I want to get the reloaded version someday so I can play the dog on a drone trough the extra stages! Now I just need to hope the Dog on a drone comes with a pink skin!

Did you ever play Wild Guns?! Do you have a favourite arcade like title? What character would you play? I have so many questions for you I might have to sleep on it! In the meantime you can already babble in the comments! Because remember, Friendship is Magic but Dreams are even more wonderful! Oyasumi.

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Kawaii Mini Blimp takes down Mean Trains 20x it’s size! Steel Empire Review

16-Geared Greetings for a 16-bit Game! My dear Island guests for SteamPunk month we are playing a few interesting Steampunk games. I am still working my way through Dishonored, as I am not very good at sneaking games! I lack the patience and can’t exactly tell how not to be spotted. I am MUCH better at Retro games and I fairly quickly adapt to old timey side scrolling shooters. So when I found a Steampunk one I was pretty happy! After I played this game I still was pretty happy! Though I may have punched my table in anger as well.

One Blimp to Rule them all!

Steel Empire came out early 1992 for Sega Genesis and has since seen several re-releases such as for Gameboy Advanced, Nintendo 3DS and even Steam. Created by Hot.B which at the time allegedly was a one man studio, and published by Flying Edge in the west, this game is a quite overlooked gem that still has a pretty loyal fanbase. Steel Empire was published in Europe under the name Empire of Steel which from what I have seen has also a few minor colour variations when it comes to enemies. Though that might be my imagination! This review is based on my own playthrough of Empire of Steel as well as a Let’s play of the American version of the game. I did this to get some insight in how to play this game, as I wanted to see as much content of the game as possible without having to study patterns for days on end.

In this game you play a talented but nameless pilot of the Silverhead Empire in the age of 18XX which might tell a story about an alternate course of events… OR is set more than 1800 years in the future where all resources have depleted. Sources are contradicting each other on that. The world is fully dependent on the power of steam.. except for your Silverhead Empire which even has the power of coldfusion. However you live an isolated life (Wakanda Forever) in the antarctic. The rest of the world is dominated by the evil Sauron (yes.. that’s his official name) who has vast armies as he marches on the Silverhead army to obtain their ultimate weapon, the Imamio Thunder.. also known as “The Lightning Bomb”. If Sauron gets his hand on this weapon he will surely dominate the world.. so you can board a tiny plane or a tiny blimp to stop him! But it will take you seven stages to do so. Now I must admit Sauron is the Japanese name of the guy.. because it kind of brought associations with them.. but let’s be honest.. I rather say I took lord Sauron down with a Blimp.. wouldn’t you?! Plus calling him Styron in Europe and the USA is like having two Richards in the group.. so you call one of them Dick.. It’s still short for Richard.

Red Hot Action

This game, for the most part, plays like a horizontal space shooter like Gradius, Pariodius and of course Chou Aniki (Something Something) plus like one third of the games on Action 52. It does follow some classical genre tropes like harsh difficulty, near bullet hell gameplay and upgrading your weapons and obtaining limited screen clearing attacks. If you played Gradius or R-Type you know what to expect here! Tiny ships about your size that blow up in a single hit on your way to a boss.. and then a boss that is like 1000x times your size and shoots from every of its many openings. With spaceships this always kind of made sense to me.. you know.. there are always several classes of ships .. gradius is Just a story about an X-wing taking down dreadnoughts. With the Steel Empire however.. everything is steampunk flavoured so we get a Blimp that is ..”regular sprite sized” fighting a train.. that doesn’t even fit in the screen. Not even half! So this is a train that is roughly three times high as a blimp.. and 40 x as long.. if not more! That is one big train! But I kind of imagine it is just one really tiny blimp! Which is just a guy sitting in it.. and that’s all the space he has! Held afloat by some hydrogen just!. I always chuckle imagining that.

Where this game differs a bit from its peers is that you can shoot to the front and back. While Silver Surfer on NES also has this function for example this game uses the Sega’s three button system to make it feel a lot more natural and a lot more effective. We have one button to shoot forward, one to shoot backwards and one to release a screen clearing Lighting Bomb should we have them. The arrows control which direction you go.. and that is all she wrote gameplay wise.. .or is it?! Steel Empire, like most other games, relies on killing enemies to drop weapon upgrades. However in this game it’s not just weapon upgrades. It’s an experience! By gathering 3 experience tokens your ship levels up, which might make weapons more powerful, it might make it a bit faster or it might give it more health. What is even cooler.. dying does not affect our weapon level (as long as you don’t play it on the GBA and for the love of all that is sacred .. do NOT play this on GBA). So as long as you have lives left.. you may be better equipped to fight the boss next time.. because you can level up. Each of the seven stages is divided in two sections. At the end of section A you always fight a midboss and at the end of section B you fight the final boss of that stage.

Empire of Steel as I should call it has a fairly strong narrative. EAch is delivered through a flickering cutscene that looks as if you are watching one of those old war time movies. Maybe even before.. The missions you get are quite diverse and fun, with some stages more dependent on your fighting skills while others rely more on your flying skills. As a rule use the blimp for the odd numbered stages which are more combat focussed and the plane for the even numbered stages. This isn’t a hardset rule and you can play this game as you like.. but it seems to work out the best. For example Stage 1 is a straight up clone of regular R-Type gameplay.. where you face a train at the end, while stage 2 is flying through a collapsing cave at high speeds. Stage 3 has you assault an enemy base.. while in Stage 4 you take on a flying fortress.. that means you have to maneuver in a lot of tight corners. Stage 7 feels more like a double Boss Rush in space.. that’s right! In this game you do go into space.. and you can be a BLIMP in space! Just for that alone this game is worth playing! The action is fun and the patterns are challenging as so cheers to Hot.B

Red Hot Air

Unfortunately this game also falls in a LOT of pitfalls of the genre, which.. if you like this type of games may or may not be a problem to you. It happens in almost every single game in the genre.. so I can’t really blame it for doing the same.. but some things are quite annoying. The most obvious would be the bosses. While you face seven stages you expect to fight seven bosses.. and seven minibosses.. but in reality you face either more or less depending on how you look at this. In stage one you fight a train as a final boss, and on stage 5 your fight another train.. sprite swapped.. with only slightly different attack patterns.. when I say slightly different attack patterns I mean it shouts either bigger pellets or faster .. or both.. In stage three and six or you fight the same boss as well.. though one time the ship is green the other time it’s red! To make it more annoying.. the second time you face it.. you don’t have to kill it once but you have to kill it twice.. and as such the game really feels padded out for gameplay time in places.. which isn’t needed because this game is kind of too long as it is. I would have preferred five stages with more diverse bosses. The minibosses also get repeated so in the end we only effectively fight 6 ish enemies in a grant total of 14 fights.

However like I said that is super common, what is less common is the way boss fights work, which makes them both unique .. but also a bit weak at times. Though this mostly applies to sub bosses. They work by having several hitboxes and you need to destroy them all. Which is fine.. it really makes utilizing the shooting back and forth function more viable and fun. The issue however is that these bosses most of the time don’t fit the screen and you are moved from front to back at regular intervals. Your aircraft can not move the edge of the screen that happens based on time… so say you are fighting a battlecruiser and have destroyed everything in the front.. you can only start moving to the back when the screen wants you too.. and if you don’t go fast enough from there it will send you back to the front again where you might not have anything left to destroy.. it basically just lowers your guard and allows the game to sneak in a few cheap hits by killing your attention. One enemy is super frustrating because he can only be hit by your secondary weapon as you can never shoot straight down or up..so some fights can get a bit tedious.

This doesn’t really ruin the space shooty fun.. but does have a chance to ruin your fun is the continue system. You get relatively few continues and will never EVER be able to make it to the end in a single playthrough. Using all your continues gives you a game over and sends you back to the beginning. Classic arcade rules and another way to pad out time. There is however a level select code.. which unfortunately is useless. If you need to start at stage 5, 6 or 7 again using level select codes brings your weapon power back to level 1 .. with that amount of health and fire power there is no way to beat the game.. so the cheat code is pretty useless.. unless you also cheat in weapon upgrades.. and that requires a second genesis controller..which you won’t always have laying about playing single player games. So cheating to skip levels.. doesn’t do anything. This is kind of annoying considering that some strategies you might not discover on your first playthrough because the game can change its own rules. For example in the final battle there are asteroids on the battlefield which just exist to hinder you.. the boss can shoot right through them.. however in his final phase he gets a huge powered solar sail and fire’s screen filling fire eye at you.. wait how ISN”T this sauron? The only way to stay safe is to hide behind the asteroids.. which goes against all previous rules so you will never guess it first try and will gameover here.

Solid as Steel

Like I said most of these things are gripes that come with the entire genre so I don’t think it is completely fair for me to judge the game on those.. it’s just elements of why I like vertical space shooters a bit more.. They tend to be a tad more straightforward. Stage 6 of this game however is super frustrating. You decent underground dodging sky forts down in a small way. you have to blow up bridges fast enough or know how a fort looks .. to dodge it properly.. thuus you need to have played it before.. When I game overed in this stage I nearly quit out of anger.. and I punched my table.. yet after taking a few breaths I realised I was having fun and I wanted to try again. That is where this game really shines. It is not fair, it is not easy and it is designed to make you at least fail one.. perhaps even twice. Yet that is how these things work.. it’s like a crane game where you push that Plushies closer and closer to the edge.. you can’t stop investing in it.

So now that I decided not to weigh it’s genre errors against it .. is there anything left to critique ? Yes there is! The music is incredibly inconsistent! Some tracks are absolute zingers and remind me of the classic Sega tracks while others are really bad and lack that Sega.. Grayish sound. With Gray sound I mean that metally.. industrial sound that Sega has compared to Nintendo.. if Nintendo makes a track for say .. F-Zero it would sound Blue.. Red and Potentially Gold.. If Sega would do it it would be Brown/Copper, Silver/Grey and Navy. That’s how it is supposed to be.. but here.. we get way to tranquil music.. almost pastel colour like at times which do not fit this game at all. There are a few very good tracks in the game that sound Sega.. but in a Steampunk game it should have been more.

Weirdly one of the biggest issues the game has.. to me kind of became a strength. This game has a lot of lag/slowdown when a lot of stuff is being shot at you. But because of the difficulty I welcomed it.. it allowed me to skillfully dodge these shots as the controller reacts perfectly in unison with the lag.. as it almost was a form of Bullet time. It wasn’t but trough this lag I could learn so many patterns. There is a lot of stuff happening on screen.. but in a way we get at least a bit of time to analyse what is happening here!. The gameplay is simple enough and the sea of bullets is dense enough to look impressive but never as big to cause dispair.. due to the slowdown I kind of ended up feeling like a major badass perfectly steering trough.. even when the game did not lag as much those earlier moments training with it made me just so much better. This is finally a horizontal shooter I can beat, and it is one with a unique setting and nice mission structure too.

The game has a lot of issues.. but it is also a game that keeps being fun despite of its issues and that is what makes a good game, at least in the retro department. Is it a classic? No.. but if you want a Steampunk game for an evening you can do a lot worse than this! It’s charming to be a Zeppelin that takes down huge trains! It has a unique and fun presentation, and the blimp is just cute! Especially in the later stages when everything is bigger than you.. but you have leveled up so much that you can decimate the screen easily. It’s super weird yet it’s also super iconic and this retro game walks a good line between unique enough and classic enough to be fun in this day and age! A very solid game..maybe not the way Scott calls his games solid.. but 7 out of 10 solid!