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Back when it was difficult to get a circuit board to do anything more interesting than throw 16 colors on a screen, home consoles were a wrecked and abortive attempt by a few dying companies, and arcades roamed the land devouring our nation's quarters, the shoot-‘em-up (shmup) was born. You had a guy, you have to shoot legion upon legion of other guys, and this was the extent of the excitement you could expect. It was a simple formula, one that anyone could wrap their head around, and it ended up being a helluva lot of fun, even if it did eat your allowance.
Eventually console gaming became a norm and people found more exciting genres to fill up their time, but occasionally a new shmup schleps its way onto the market, asking you to please, if you could, relive the heyday when you didn't need save points and plot and anything but quick reflexes. 1942: Joint Strike is one such game, really dazzling you with graphics in all of the thirty minutes you'll be playing it. A visually tasty reminder of why these games just aren't made anymore.
Let’s let fly after the jump
The 194X series is an old series that's officially lost its way. Probably one of the first additions to the endless plethora of World War II games, it started off concentrating on imaginary skirmishes over the Pacific Frontier, and after a few iterations, seems to be about taking down heavily-armed 747s over volcanos for some unknown and invisible army. While it seems a bit pointless, the enemy, whoever they are, felt it necessary to throw about 3,000 planes at you, so let’s just go with it.
So you're on a blasé mission for the whoever army, and you get a choice of three planes; regular, sturdy, and quick. While flying, you can pick up one of three different weapon upgrades, or acquire one of two different superweapons that only last ten seconds each, and once you defeat the game's five bosses…that's it. There is nothing else. The game is so blatantly short and low on content that one wonders how much work they put into animating that volcano. No unlockables, no theatrics, just running and gunning and a very passive ‘fin’ at the end.
Lack of content aside, it does look good. It's a bit cartoony, sure, but still believable and pleasing, and the whole "roll of film" motif they have throughout is clever, as if you're supposedly watching lost footage of one plane taking on a gajillion others. It's a good look, even when the camera steals the game away from you to fly over a destroyed dam in sepia tones (why?). The touch-up is probably the biggest selling point, producing one of the better looking games in the arcade.
Gameplay is everything you’d expect. It's the usual routine; each plane moves in its own way, so you know what to expect when one creeps onto the screen. I hope you don’t like your thumbs, because they will get quite a workout as you have to buttonmash just to keep firing. A for a regular hit, X for a missile attack (which you slowly acquire with each kill), and Y to drop “the bomb” which hurts everything on the screen. That’s pretty much what you’ll be doing the whole time, except for this odd little bit where you’re being chased by the final boss and dodging biplanes, but other than that, it’s a familiar bit.
Familiar being the right word for what you’ve got here. The game is the same, no matter how you come at it. The difficulty you select only determines the number of lives you have, the flight paths and spawn points and modifiers will all be exactly the same. It allows for the rinse-and-repeat gameplay that one comes to expect from shmups, but seems a bit short when compared to the variety we expect today.
The boss battles are graded, with a letter assigned based on how quickly you burn it down, which depends on how well-stocked you are when you fly up to it, which itself depends on how well you know the levels themselves. In this way, it practically screams "play me over and over," until you learn every little detail and get the most points, but when the end result is being the biggest weener on a insignificant forum board, it still feels pointless.
In a very gimmicky kind of way (it's in the title, for chris's sake), this game features a very exciting co-op mode. Sure, all they do is drag you through the single player version again and double the number of enemies, but it's just the right amount of enemies to make the air battles seem hectic and heartracing. You also can choose a special "joint strike," a special attack that depends on where your partner is. You can extend lightning between the two planes, hitting everything in between, for example. It's a nice trick, allowing for more of a co-op kind of play, and with Live Support that actually works, it makes the multiplayer a viable option.
Sadly, there is only so much I can say about a game that you can clear while waiting for the pizza guy. I enjoy playing the game, it's mindless fun with just the right number of tricks that drove the genre, and the multiplayer is fastpaced enough to kill a half-an-hour in an exciting fashion, but in the end it's just the same nonsense that we've seen before. No innovation, no real content to speak of, and no reason to ever look upon it again after you've gotten as many achievements as you're willing to attempt.
It just feels lazy; other shmups tend to be longer and feel more juicy, there are a lot of things they could have added easily, but didn't, and it markets itself to a subset that just isn't in abundance anymore. It’s going to take a bit more than a new can of paint to make people excited about shmups again. Right now, it’s just a funny name for a genre. He he, shmups.
Final Score: C
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