Old School - Dangun Feveron and Gunlock/Rayforce

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Old School - Dangun Feveron and Gunlock/Rayforce

Postby RabidYak on Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:35 pm

I fired up a couple of vertical shooters in MAME today since I fancied some of that and I thought i'd do a quick write up of the two games I played.

I've not usually got much time for later 2D shooters, mainly because because they spend more time filling up the screen with bullets then actually doing anything interesting. I do make one exception though for an utterly bonkers game called Dangun Feveron, which I presume is very bad engrish for Disco Fever.

While the enemies and setting in this game are the usual space fare, it has a bizzare disco theme to it that has to be seen to believed. The backround music is a load of naff knock-offs of 70s songs, you get bonus points for collecting spinning people that fly out of the enemies when you destroy them and some of the visuals for the bomb attacks are silluetes of disco dancers.

In terms of the game play, you have a choice of 3 different firing patterns and 3 different bomb attacks. It also lets you choose a speed for your ship as well, which is particularly useful in this game as it can have a very quick pace to it compared to allot of others. While the amount of activity on screen can be the typical bullet nightmare of games from this period, the sheer rediculousness of having a load of 70s nonsence wrapped around an otherwise standard shooter sort of blunts the frustration and makes it allot more entertaining then it should be.

The second game I revisited was Taito's Gunlock (Rayforce in Japan), an excellent early 90s game running on thier F3 system. Again the theme of the game is its the usual space buisness, but Gunlock really stands out because it uses almost every trick that was in the 2D book at the time to do some fancy stuff that you don't see all that often.

In particular, it makes heavy use of parallex scrolling and sprite scalling to give an unusual sense of depth to the backround. It also adds to the gameplay as the lower levels of scrolling often have targets in them and are frequently used by approaching enemies, all of which can be shot at with a secondary laser that locks onto them using a crosshair that moves ahead of your ship.

The sound and music is particularly good as well, which adds to the overall polish of the game. The only real failing of the game is that its too much for the hardware that it ran on, which leads to occasional slowdown as it strugles to cope with everything that is going on. This can be eliminated througth the wonders of emulation though by overlocking the emulated processors.

Overall, i'd recommend giving both of these a go if you have them lying around or can D/L them without much hassle. Gunlock in particular deserves a look as a good example of what could be done back then, but frequently wasent since it was easier and cheaper to churn out more pedestrian titles.

I did take some screenies of these games, but none of them were any good and there are some much better ones here -
http://www.classicgaming.com/shmups/reviews/dfeveron/screens.htm
http://www.classicgaming.com/shmups/reviews/rayforce/index.html
Last edited by RabidYak on Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby were on Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:40 pm

*clap clap clap*

havent played mame for the logest..need to get a good toorent link to update the mame roms and chd images
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Postby Silverhaze on Wed Jun 07, 2006 11:42 am

Looks like you havent typed for the logest too!! I'll get a typing tutor toorent for ya were! ;)


Nice reviews there Yak!! Chances of ever seeing those on Xbox Live are slim to none and I like were have not used mame for an age!!! Might be nice to go back and see how bad these games look on my LCD monitor lol
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