MMMC: Sky Shark

[TheDomesticInstitution]

This week we'll be playing Romstar's Sky Shark, dammit.



I haven't played it yet, but it appears to be a historically accurate WWI era vertical shooter. If you love bi-planes or think the word "bi-plane" is kind of funny, this game may be for you.

For more Sky Shark info, click here for the KLOV entry.

So let's everyone whip out our joysticks, in this decade-ending-extravaganza-edition of...

THE MONDAY MORNING MAME CLUB!

Click this sentence to download TEH ROMZ. MMMC roms hosted courtesy of Flack.

Rules: You do not need to sign up for the club. If you want to participate, simply download the game of the week and fucking post about it! No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited.

Compatibility Issues: I was running the latest version of MAMEUI and couldn’t get this ROM to show up in my ROM list. After downloading an older version of MAME32 I was able to use the ROM. You may not experience this problem, but I thought I’d give a heads up just in case. Ask if you need to know the MAME versions I am running. Also this is a clone of Flying Shark.

[Ed Oscuro]

Score: 217,040, Area 42 (endurance pros will just record how many times they've looped the game!), after a few plays. I'm 2 for 3 against the first stage boss today (including my first attempt). I did put on autofire (rate 6) to save my hands, more on that in a bit. Not too bad - my current (pretty lame) highscore at Shmups Forum is over 300K.

This is actually a Toaplan game. It's "a Romstar game" in the same sense that you could say Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins is. The licensing for this particular game is even more convoluted than is usual for Toaplan because the game is doubly licensed: Taito distributed it in most places (and it says Taito on the screen; most people wouldn't have realized this was developed by a company called Toaplan), but Taito further licensed its distribution to Romstar, apparently.

This is one of my all-time favorites. Along with Twin Cobra (also 1987, also Toaplan) these games rocked the arcade scene. They don't scroll all that smoothly, they aren't as flashy as many other games. People generally don't tend to remember them as often as many other games from 1987, but they're hugely influential on the development of the shooter genre. It's also received a surprising number of ports - NES (under this same name, generally a poor conversion but people tend to remember it fondly for the Tim Follins remix work), IBM DOS PC, X68000, FM Towns (with terrible synth music on CD), and probably some others. I'll try to get a picture of the cover of the X68000 game up tomorrow; it's rather grand.

I'm not sure about the game's theme; I believe some of the ports mention WWI as well but when you look at the jungle and then the various WWII-style amphibious assault ships it seems that it's set in that twilight era I suppose you could call "Toaplan history." I would guess the enemy forces are closest to being Japanese, actually, similar to Capcom's 194X series. It's a similar deal with Twin Cobra, which despite having choppers generally has a sort of retro feel and huge tank bosses.

Gameplay Tips

This game is not so much about reflexes as about pure memorization (especially due to the slower ship speed). The first is the large volume of fire you must create. Some old games can be overcome fairly easily with autofire because they were designed with the idea that a person's fingers would need a lot of stamina to keep firing fast for a long time. However, Flying / Sky Shark is not one of them.

All the same, if you are playing via emulator or on real hardware you would do well to look into applying autofire to save your hand. However, the limited processing capability of this board made the designers limit the number of shots onscreen at a time, to only four volleys (they can be wide though). At the first boss, you'll notice this encourages you to get right up its nose to be able for a faster kill (i.e. before the support tanks show up). The rest of the time, though, you'll find that you can get into trouble if you've shot all four volleys immediately before a biplane homes in on your position or immediately before the last plane in a bonus formation cuts across the sky to freedom.

Two ways you can prevent this from being a problem are by holding your fire when there's nothing in sight (which you would have to do anyway in the arcade to rest your fingers) and by waiting until enemies line up so you can shoot "right down the barrel" at them, instead of trying to strafe side-to-side to hit them and having precious shots go wasted.

While it doesn't have Twin Cobra's bonus items system (think Metal Slug - you get a bonus at the end of the level for how many of these you pick up), it does have another classic (nasty) Toaplan shooting game staple (trick) that folks at Shmups Forum like to call

Bomb Pride.

A player's Bomb Pride is provoked when a game gives them reasons not to use bombs. In Twin Cobra, you get something like 3,000 points per bomb unused in a stage, and then your count is reset back to three (other Toaplan games are even more unforgiving, not giving you a bonus until you have nine of the buggers under your wing, but then giving you a sizable bonus per bomb kept, but you lose all the extra ones if you get hit once).

I have spent a VERY long time playing around the start of the game because I obsessed about the first stage score (shooting for 80K points is a good goal - on two of my runs today I came very close). After the first stage, though, there's no reason not to use bombs (very sparingly). You can't try to use them to get out of all sticky situations (or just dump them all on bosses) because they aren't unlimited - however it's a better idea to try to get further in the game or to use them to stay alive than it is to die trying for 15 to maybe 25 thousand measly points in a stage when you've just restarted with the lousy two shots.

Ultimately, obsessing over the bomb stock is silly because this game loops endlessly. You would have to play it for nearly a day (hours and hours and hours) to come close to maximizing the score.

There are some other features that will make you groan: Enemies that come from behind (watch out for these starting in stage 2); fast bullets always aimed at you (credit to Bloodreign); tons of kamikaze planes; flying bonus items that disappear off the edge of the screen if you trigger it at the wrong time (oops), and the danger of chasing a bonus item to the top of the screen; formations of bonus planes that are hard to take down; the random appearance of the silver one-up six plane formation (they leave an extra plane when shot down, very handy); and so on. The game is very good about putting some big, fat, juicy target in your sights and then moving some tiny little snipers in on the side to make you need to dodge bullets from two completely different axes. The only way to deal with those effectively is to know where they're coming from in advance, unfortunately. Another "tough love" feature is the checkpoint system. Like the Japanese version of Twin Cobra, you get sent back to a checkpoint when you die. On the one hand, it's a short rest period. On the other, it makes it much harder to get past bosses because (unlike Twin Cobra US or two-player versions of Toaplan shooters like Hellfire) you can't use your current death to get closer to the screen moving past the boss (sending you to the next stage and thus saving your bacon), which is known as "timing out" the boss.

Something I love about the game is its cinematic sensibility. Toaplan games like to set up memorable scenes and they aren't all just based around the various combat scenarios you'll face. My favorite (thus far) from this game is the little stranded tank in the desert. Everybody remembers Zero Wing's botched English translation, but my favorite moment in a Toaplan game so far may well be the failed takeoff attempt in Fire Shark, a sequel of sorts to this game which is even harder.

Good music, good control (but the slow movement speed keeps you on edge the whole time), great scenes, epic fat bosses: A blast all around.

One of my favorite games of all time.

[TheDomesticInstitution]

After dicking with MAME for several hours and over several beers Sunday night, I finally got this to work. I had to find a version of MAME that would play this and Berzerk with sound. Those were my 2 requirements. It seems the higher the version of MAME the slower it plays some games... it especially chokes on Berzerk, as I'm sure you all remember. Anyway I found a happy medium with .112. I also found out that I needed the parent ROM of flying shark to play this game. I didn't even know what a parent ROM was until Sunday night.

Anyway... my initial thoughts... and I apologize for the rambling.

I played this off and on for several hours yesterday. I did not use autofire, but I did set my lives to 5, and the difficulty to easy, as I often do with continue based games. This is like an early version of Raiden. It's got an initial difficulty, that I find a little steep. I prefer the forgiveness of 1943, with it's energy tank health system, vs. the 1 shot and your dead world of Sky Shark.

And just to be clear, I was joking about it being historically accurate... it's looks like a mish-mash of all wars prior to the vietnam era.

So I got to the second stage, but realized I couldn't hack it and barely got to the boss, which was I assume, the aircraft carrier? I think my max score was about 8x,xxx.

I've never been a nut for shooters. I like them, but find they are difficult and unkind to people who don't play them often. Hence my favoritism for 1943. I like the (S)NES era shooters like Lifeforce and Gradius III mainly because of the 30 life thing.

Maybe one day, I'll be halfway decent at games like this, but for now I'll just dabble in them as I come across them. Doesn't mean I don't like them, it just means I'm outmatched, and my gaming sessions don't last long. Anyway I'll play some more of this, and chime in if I get any further along.

[Arasoi]

I like this game a lot, unfortunately my Sky Shark pcb is unhappy(read: non working), and I'm on a holiday vacation. I'll try to fire this up on MAME when I get back.

[Ed Oscuro]

This is like an early version of Raiden.

Bang on the money, TDI! Raiden wasn't Seibu Kaihatsu's first game (Arasoi and I have been looking for that one, it's called Air Raid or Cross Shooter, boy what a unique name) but it was their first famous one. User Randorama on Shmups Forum called it a "doujin homage" to the Toaplan games, and also detailed some of the music remixes from Toaplan games in Raiden. Yes, even the famous first-stage music of Raiden is not an original composition. It's Toaplan baybee!

[TheDomesticInstitution]

So this morning, I flipped the LCD monitor on it's side and decided to play a few more rounds. I got up to a 105,770. Again, no cheats enabled, but I do have it set to 5 lives, Easy difficulty, and continues enabled. I got to stage 3, but when I died, I forgot to add a credit, and it didn't let me continue.

I've found that on stage 2, it's better to try and take out all the boats, as you sweep across the screen. If you try and avoid them, you'll be overwhelmed pretty quickly as the planes being to swoop in.

Also I almost passed the 1st stage without getting killed. I had almost beat the tank boss, with a third bomb, but got too close and killed by a stray rocket.

I've found in situations where the screen becomes full of enemy fire and, well, enemies, is to aim a bomb into the middle of the mess and take cover in the center of the blast because it wipes out all the bullets. This became especially helpful when encountering the big ship/carrier near the end of stage 2.

[Ed Oscuro]

Just a quick note - I thought that I'd try playing with a Saturn pad for faster diagonal movement (as opposed to doing my usual routine of moving my fingers back and forth along the arrow keys). When autofire is off, that's a bad move. Tapping a controller in your hand quickly while trying to keep precise movements on the d-pad = dead at the first boss.

Incidentally, all that needs to be done at the first boss is to sit near the bottom of the screen and weave around the middle of its shots. Going to the outside of the screen (which I foolishly tried this time) always gets me killed, so I don't do it. It's a good idea to take out the boss before the tanks show up.

Game's hard on the trigger finger by design. If I had a arcade joystick plugged into my PC I'd tap those buttons but trying to use a control pad without autofire puts anybody at a severe disadvantage (incidentally, Contra 4 has a similar design about the non-machine gun weapons like the Spread which I dislike for this reason, although that game's slower paced than this and diagonals don't count for much so you usually don't need to be quite as precise with the d-pad when firing quickly).