Sorry for the lack of blog updates. "Real Life" has gotten pretty busy with the birth of our first child, but that hasn't kept me from picking up a few random PCBs over the holidays.
First up is Heavy Unit, a relatively unknown Taito published shmup on Kaneko hardware, and apparently was unemulated up until the end of 2010. You can still find this pretty cheap in the US, so I went ahead and got one.
The detailed artwork is rather nice, a mix of bio-horror and mecha type enemy and scenery. You have standard powerups for your A and B shots (no bomb button), and a transforming powerup that switches your ship to a mecha. Unfortunately the game suffers from lack of autofire, which means a very sore wrist without (or much easier game with) autofire. Rank seems to depend completely on your powerup level, which is nice when you die, as its not too difficult to get powered up again.
I haven't had enough time to play this past the first few levels, and I like the detail and variety of enemies, but feel the game may be too easy with autofire. Bosses go down quite quickly if you are fully powered up. I'll come back to this when I get more time to clear the game.
Congrats on the child. :)
ReplyDeleteThis is a real nice game for its time (1988)
ReplyDeleteWhat's you have is a WORLD version of the game. Good luck, the game is hard :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Alexis! Yes I'm more and more impressed with the quality put into this game. Still haven't played to the end to see how difficult it can get. As mentioned before autofire does make the earlier levels seem much easier.
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