I'm sure there's about 5 of you who will care, but for those of you considering a purchase of Mobile Light Force PSX, this is for you.
Those of you playing at home should note my love for all things shmup. You might also note my strong wish for these budget label PSX publishers to bring over some of the PSX shmups that were stranded in Japan. Well, I got my wish, and man did they botch it.
Exibit A: "Mobile Light Force." First off, let's examine the cover art:
Now, take a look at that, and tell me what you think this game is? If you guessed a Charlie's Angels game, you'd be dead wrong. Understandable, but wrong. What's under the cover? Why, it's none other than Gunbird! Perhaps some of you are familiar with Gunbird 2 on the DC? For those who aren't, let's have a look at the true Japanese cover art for this game:
Hmm...quite different, eh?
For those who have never played it, Gunbird is a fantastic shmup from Psikyo with a very silly magic oriented theme. A lot of the charm of this game comes from the absurd story line. Although the game is pretty nonsencical, the characters make a little more sence if you know what's going on. (Yeah, I know the concept of playing a shmup for it's story is pretty absurd, but it does help you differenciate one from the other.)
So, I knew going into it that they'd retitled the game and given it some really misleading cover art. What I didn't know is that they removed all the story elements from the game entirely! Before reaching a boss, the game just pauses a bit, you see the evil characters you are chasing scamper off on the ground and then you fight the boss. Nothing, na da. The elements before the levels are gone as well.
Hmm...bit of a dissapointment there, but why really plays a shmup for the story, right? Yeah it takes the personality out of the game, but I kind of expected things would be changed to make it fit the "Mobile Light Force" mode. And there's still the gameplay, right???
Well, to add insult to injury, you can't change the screen mode. Now with Psikyo's vertical scrolling shmups, you get three screen options. First, there is Tate mode. Tate puts the image on it's side so if you flip your TV over you can play it in proper arcade mode. Nearly every shmup that gets a US release is missing this, so I wasn't expecting that.
Then there are two other non-flipping modes that I would relate to letterboxed and pan and scan for movies. The letterboxed type gives you the full screen with black bars to the left and right. It's a little small, but you get the whole image.
The pan and scan version is like this, imagine a magnifing glass on the screen. The image is a little bigger than the letterboxed version and you don't get the whole image on your screen at the same time. To make up for that, the magnifing part "scrolls" when you reach about the half way mark. In a game that's already scrolling, this makes for some very jerky game play and when you cross that line, the screen starts scrolling faster and then slows down. To make matters worse, there is always going to be stuff shooting at you above or below that magnified part because it's still there even though you can't see it.
In a game like Gunbird where there's lots of stuff coming at you at all times, this makes playing a real chore. First off you can't see when an enemy is on screen, all you see is bullets floating at you and you don't know from where. Second, in Gunbird, finding the "safe zone" is crucial and it's damn hard to do when the scroll speed of the screen is constantly changing. I played with this mode on DC Gunbird 2 once and never went back because it makes the game really really hard and cheap when you can't see what's shooting at you.
EDIT: It would appear that the Japanese PSX version only has the pan and scan mode as opposed to the Saturn vers which has it all. Ok, I can't fault XS for that, but my complaint still stands. I'll leave this part of the rant for those of you considering a purchase to play. Go Saturn, that seems to be the only way to go.
The final insult? You can't save your scores. I'm really confused as to why this was taken out. I mean I can't think of a single reason for it. Small beans to some, but shmups are all about score and to not be able to save your score is a real dissapointment.
EDIT: Looks like this wasn't in the JPN PSX version either. Man, I'm striking out here. Still, it's a pretty weak thing, but it looke like half my ire is for the original JPN release and half is for XS pulling the story elements, which were translated in the arcade version. Considering they cut and pasted their own title screen, how hard would it have been to cut and paste the translated story elements? Sigh.
Ok, I know, I know, "What do you want for $10?" I know it seems silly to get this worked up about a $10 release for a dead console, but I'm really appaled that they took a fantastic game in a genre that doesn't get much love and gutted it for no reason. It gives me a headache playing the game with the scrolling speeding up and slowing down constantly and makes a tough but well balanced game play really unfair and cheap.
The only reason this bothers me is Psikyo is one of my favorite shmup developers and I was really exicted about getting another of their games on a US release. I know some of you might think I've really flipped out this time, but I think Psikyo's games are art and this is so chopped up it makes me mad. It's really senseless that they cut so much out when it was all there in the Japanese release. This was a fantastic game in it's original form, but as it was released here, it's severly lacking.
If you were considering buying this, I really can't reccommend it. If you've never played this game before, you'll probably think it's utter crap based on this release. I'd advise anyone who really wants to play it to get the import Saturn or MAME it. Even at $10, I still feel ripped off.
All these months I've been hoping someone would pick up DoDonpachi and now, I'm really hoping they don't. I'd rather pay import prices than play DDP in a form like this.
OK, long rant over. You can wake up now. (At least until I get to spend some serious time with Mobile Light Force 2 on PS2 )
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