Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

I remember Gun Frontier with very mixed
feelings. Have you ever played it, maybe on Sat-
urn - where you might have exploited the auto
fire feature to make the game easier and more
enjoyable? Back in 1990 I had a lot of prob-
lems with it, courtesy of the insane number of
enemies and the necessity to button-mash like a
fiend. My uncle made a simple hack to partially
overclock the fire rate, which was helpful, but
made me feel like a cheater.
I discovered recently that this game (and
since I mentioned it, Carrier Airwing too) were
some of the targets of such cheaty practices in
many Japanese arcades. Hell, at some points
programmers gave up and started putting auto
fire in as the default option in shooters.
Gun Frontier hasn’t aged well. Rendering
techniques were pretty primitive, gameplay was
a bit stiff, even for the time, and the game has
a nasty ranking system and even worse restart
points. Yet still, there was something about the
game (even if this has by no means the best
audio work by Yack and OGR), about its peculiar
and truly original atmosphere, about the space
shuttles half-covered by the dunes in Stage 4
and the incredibly climatic duel at the end of the
game.
The game itself is pretty simple. Well, one
original idea is its power-up system. You need
five small icons to get one extra power level,
and 40 small bomb icons for an extra bomb. Ok,
this is not a true innovation as most Compile
games worked in that way, but that was the first
time that I saw such an approach in an arcade
game. Small but meaningful change, eh? There
is at least one point in which you can send a
mid-boss to its resting place in such a way that
it gives you a few extra points if you destroy it
by targeting a specific area. There are so many
96 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #3
shooters since that use this mechanic that I find
it pointless to stress again how influential this
game has been.
Back when I was 12, I couldn’t predict
that this game would have such a deep impact
on future shooters. Well, I didn’t care, nor do I
really care now. My enjoyment wasn’t a question
of gameplay. I mean, the gameplay is simple
- shoot stuff before it shoots you. The final
boss battle works like an old western duel: you
need to be the quick if you don’t want to be the
dead, leaving Gloria to be engulfed by an eternal
nightmare. This is but one great thing about the
game, much in the vein of the epic duels be-
tween the white hats and the black hats. Except
nobody is wearing a white or black hat. Actually,
I wouldn’t even suggest shades of gray: after
all, it’s just a game.
The important thing is that there are two
main reasons to play: score and atmosphere. As
I said, the game hasn’t a particular score-sys-
tem to talk about, so frankly, I played it for the
atmosphere. Speaking of which, I think that its
melancholic atmosphere is what made me think
of Sergio Leone’s western movies in the first
place.
Atmosphere was why other people played
this shooter as well. I wouldn’t label it as a
very successful game – not in the sense that I
needed to queue to play it, which is usually a
good indication of success for an arcade game.
Despite its relative unpopularity, there were
a few people playing it with gusto and passion
- among them my father and uncle. They were
the ones who constantly made comparisons
to westerns by Leone while I kept thinking of
Matsumoto’s anime.
I don’t know if the true West had improb-
able heroes flying on planes built like Smith and