24. Peak Treasure: Gunstar Heroes

I've never clicked with run and gun series. I've tried a few times, never for a long time, but it's been a game style that I have never been able to click with. Finishing Metal Slug last year is the most I've played to this date. Typically I find them too hard, generally dying before even reaching end of level bosses.

Similarly, I haven't even been able to get far in games made by Treasure, but I do very much respect them. They always seem to make a point to make their games unique, to quote a good friend of mine, Alicia: "the real signature element to most Treasure game design is "intentionally violating norms and rules you expect from the genre"". The Treasure game I have smashed my head against most is Ikaruga, having never gotten any further than the second level of the game. Treasure games are invariably NOT easy.

Treasure had a reputation of pushing the systems they placed their games on to the limit, resulting in graphics that are impressive in both what is on screen and the performance, which is necessary given the style of game they made would be unplayable without a smooth framerate.

These days, Treasure is sadly a shadow of its former self, with less than 10 employees, and no games released since some small 3DS games in 2014. Some of their games have been ported to modern systems since, but by other companies, frequently the fairly-maligned Nicalis. Nicalis sucks.

Gunstar Heroes gets almost straight into the action: a quick decision on character, starting weapon and selecting the level, and you're in. These decisions have a pretty big impact though: the characters have unqiue playstyles, where one will move while shooting and holding a direction, while another does not move while shooting but can shoot in any direction while standing still. This has benefits and drawbacks, where with one style you don't need to be movingt to shoot in certain directions, but in the other you need to stop shooting to be able to move.

One of the coolest things in the game is the weapon combination system. As you pick up a second weapon, it becomes combined with the other, creating a unique weapon, and resulting in 10 possible combinations of the 4 weapon types.

Starting off the first level, I was extremely concerned that the jungle level was going to have me rescuing "natives". Given representation in videogames of the 90s, and well... still today, I was concerned this might result in a less than subtle depiction of an african culture, informed by colonialist lies.

Thanks for the save IGN, I forgot to take a screenshot!

They're just a bunch of tiny little guys! I was so relieved!

The first level starts off extremely easy, with the enemies being mostly cannon fodder up to the first mini-boss, a plant. This sets the tone for how weird the ganme can get, as you shoot this violently wobbling stalk of asparagus that rains down bullets and eggs that hatch into giant caterpillars. Keeping the silly tone, the second boss is a series of boxes animated in a simlar manner to last years constructs from Tears of the Kingdom.

While I beat this second boss the first time with out much difficulty, dying shortly after sent me back to fight it. Using a continue started me off with the basic weapon only, and unable to deal fast damage any longer, I found out that it has a move where it can regenerate all it's health if not killed fast enough. Several times this resulted in a very protracted fight where I would end with a huge chunk of missing health. Eventually I gave up and started again with the other play style and a different weapon (lightning) and it became laughably easy.

The last third of this level was a lowlight. Specifically there was hornets nests that sent out small enemies to attack, their size making them difficult to hit. While trying to fight these off, invincible robot arms attack as well, resulting in the need to move frequently. There's a good argument that bees/hornets in videogames are always bad, and with the exception of one boss in pikmin 3, I tend to agree.

The end boss for the first world was challenging but also quite fun. There's frequent attacks that need to be dodged while attacking, and the boss itself occasionally jumps around itself, with a very fun mech design being piloted by 3 different boss characters. Most importantly though, when defeated, all three blast off, Team Rocket style.

The second world completely changes a lot that was established in the first. It becomes an autoscrolling level in a tunnel, where the main character is on a minecart that can cling to the floor, roof or walls, and has the ability to jump from one to another. Unlike the first level, there are no mid level bosses, instead a gauntlet fighting against enemies on similar minecarts, flying, or as passangers on train carriages. Eventually, the train is revealed to be piloted by... M Bison?

The boss at the end of the level was my end point of the playthrough. Seven Force, as its name implies, has seven different phases. As I was playing on normal, that means I would have had to beat five of them without dying, the best I managed was three. In my experience, bosses are where Treasure games have their biggest difficulty spike, and this was absolutely the case here.

There was also a level of randomness involved. Before the boss a second weapon can be attained, but it is random, so you can end up with a combination that is all but useless against the boss. After beating it's first form, it changes to one of the other six. They're all pretty good, but nothing beats GUN.

All of them are made up from a collection of various sprites which are shifted around to give the impression of a very large enemy with quite impressive animation. This animation style is most impressively demonstrated by this random jacked dude.

I'd been intrigued by this game for some time, so taking the time to play it was definitely worth it. However, the bizarre difficulty spikes didn't make for an entirely enjoyable play time, with nearly half spent bashing my head against that transforming boss at the end of the second level. I can definitely see how finally learning how to deal with his many attacks to defeat him would be gratifying, but I'm not sure that's what I want from videogames these days.

A lot of frustration for me came from how both playstyles felt like a half-measure. Ideally you would be able to move and shoot in any direction, but the limitations of the MegaDrive gamepad make the choice to split that amongst two playstyles makes sense.

After completing my hour with the game, I wanted to better understand why someone might be into games like these. A good friend of mine, Alicia, has been playing shooters of all types since their youngest baby gamer days. She's heavily involved in the local FGC as an organiser and competitor, and is a speed runner in a variety of bizarre Shmups. And so, I did an interview!

Connell (oh, that's me!): So this might he too broad, but I'm curious as someone who can never get into this sort of game. What was the appeal for you?

Alicia: I grew up in a household with extremely limited and strict access to video games as a child. Since my dad ran a video rental business, game consoles were something that lived outside the house, with limited appearances when a customer complaint required some troubleshooting and testing, or Dad would bring an older, unpopular console down for a week in the school holidays.

Until I was 10 years old the only PC in the house was a 286 eventually upgraded to a 386 then a 486. There was limited game time allowed for that on weekends. Thus, my regular game experiernce was all text-heavy, strategic affairs. Nethack, early Wizardry titles, ZZT, the Microsoft QuickBasic demo games, the various Infocom titles and so on. Hell, I was excited when the poor PC died due to the Y2K bug because our shiny new Pentium 3 was capable of finally letting me play Myst at home!

Thus, arcadey and action games were the rare forbidden fruit. The call of fast-paced, colourful, id-driven action. The promise of a lifetime's emotions within an hour at most. The thrill of immediate conquest and violence pitched against the risk of having to start all over again after just a few mistakes.

PC design peaked in the 90s

Connell: Yo a pentium! I remember the pentium 100, our first computer

That's an extremely interesting origin. I would have thought you'd have been into these games as a younger girl, so to find out it wasn't until your teens makes your skills more impressive. And infuriating.

Alicia: A lot of action games at the time were also just visual delights. My life was ruined at 7 years old when I was home ill one day so my Dad tucked me into the parents' bed, wheeled in our one TV with the VCR and just left me a box set of Space Battleship Yamato. Thus, the presence of anime-aesthetic action games was all the more appealing.

Anime, however, peaked in the 70s

Connell: Anime does indeed ruin everything

Alicia: Well the other big impact around that age was seeing Metal Slug 1's attract mode at a basketball court in 1996. If Phantasy Star 1 was my moment of realising science fiction and fantasy could blend, Phantasy Star IV was my moment of realising game narratives could have complexity, then Metal Slug 1 was my moment of "oh video games can just be beautiful to look at as works of art"

But yes I was terrible at action games until around 13 or so. Think that's when I first unlocked the Landmaster in Lylat Wars (200 kills on Venom + all wingmen alive)

Connell: Nice! I was the designated guy for that role of at least 3 cartridges for friends.

Alicia: Don't get me started on Expert Sector Z's medal. Best handled by using the Sector X warp. Most miserable stretch of gameplay you can do on a route.

Connell: So how much of the skill in these games comes from memorisation, and how much from precision and reaction?

Alicia: Depends on the game but I'd say on average it's about an 80:20 skewing in favour of memorisation. There's often an idea in gaming discourse that a game should in theory be beatable on its first try. That's nonsense. That's reducing games to a single set of skills, one that decays the fastest as people age and thus can become a serious barrier to entry. You wanna know another name for memorisation?

Learning.

The more familiar you are with a game's level layouts and enemy behaviours, the more you can think critically about how to respond to them. You get to plan out routes through levels which keep you alive. You learn to identify priority threats, and which situations aren't immediately dangerous but need to be watched in your periphery. Something slow-paced like the original Castlevania's a great game for forcing you to learn these skills because you simply cannot brute-force your way through most situations. It's typical design for most all action games of the era. Hell, when Dodonpachi released in 1996 there was very serious discourse in the Japanese Shmup community that by having slower, denser bullet patterns it was providing people with too many opportunities to use twitch-reactions to make their way through after a few credits of play rather than spending $200 working out R-Type Stage 5's checkpoint recoveries and the like.

Connell: That's a perspective I hadn't considered, but it makes a lot of sense. Particularly since these games are typically so short

Alicia: Basically, twitch reactions and technical skill checks are ways to add friction and spice to a game. They're like the pinfalls in a pro wrestling match. Sure the result is on paper determined, but you only need to believe for one or two seconds that the underdog competitor might actually be booked to win and you'll shout "Aaah!" when the kick-out happens.

Same for reaction checks. You've got your route planned, but can you really evade this high-speed three-way shot? Did you really position yourself correctly beforehand? Same for execution requirements. It's one thing to know how to avoid a three-way shot but it's another thing to do it in a game like Alien Soldier where you have to know the difference in inputs to jump off a wall vs inverting your gravity vs using a teleport dash vs manually hovering.

Those moments of doubt can cause excitement for the viewer, but also increase stress for the player themselves. The more you doubt, the greater the chance you'll make other mistakes. One slip up on something you've practiced numerous times before can get you tilted and cause a snowball effect. When I say a lifetime of emotions in a run, those are the moments of intense doubt, sorrow, anger, bargaining. The grief which needs to be experienced for an eventual triumph to feel earned.

Joseph Campbell's Monomyth is real but only for player psychology in well designed action games.

Connell: You have a huge love for the shmup and run and gun genres, do you have a favorite of the two? Would you consider them even necessarily different?

Alicia: Obviously there's a lot of crossover since they're games where you shoot and dodge. Shmups can use terrain hazards to make you write essays about Objectively Correct Design™️ while run 'n guns can use platforming segments for the same salty result.

There's some significant differences between a horizontal 4:3 or 16:9 visual perspective versus a vertical 3:4 though. Horizontal games are much better at conveying a sense of occupying a real space for verisimilitude. Vertical lose some of that pure thematic immersion in favour of much more convenient visual tracking. It is significantly easier for your eyes to work out where you are, where your threats are and for your brain to solve how to avoid them in a vertical 3:4 game than a horizontal.

So with that in mind, I'll give my favourites in both horizontal and vertical form as of this moment right now. These will change depending on my mood and whether I'm feeling tougher, needing more relaxtion or aiming for a purely aesthetic experience.

Vertical Shmup: I have been banging my head and screaming at Battle Garegga for over a year so I'm inclined to get a bit tsundere and say that. For something I gladly go back to over and over and can consistently clear: Batsugun Special Version.

Horizontal Shmup: Darius Gaiden's usually going to take the cake here as one of my go-to meditative action games. OGR's more mellow, surreal output melds with psychedelic visuals to create an entrancing dreamscape. Still using 7 stages per route gives the game enough time and space to distribute items in a way that leads to a satisfying flow without quite the shield-starved stress that G has.

Vertical Run 'n Gun: I need to finish practicing the speed routing so I can demonstrate it at more Australian gaming events so I'm going with Shock Troopers for the Neogeo today. It's a bit of a snide hipster game to bring up ("it's totally better than Metal Slug you guys!!!") but only because it really is underrated and an incredible game with a lot of surprisingly friendly systems to keep a credit going.

Horizontal Run 'n Gun: It seems obvious to say a Metal Slug game at this point but I'm going to specifically say Metal Slug 2 (Turbo Hack). I think that X both gives away the late-game twist far too soon and begins the series' descent into romhacky level design. X is when the games start designing around how players were using certain systems rather than pursuing a thematic and emotional goal. As for the Hack part, it's really just a bugfix for a single line of code so the game doesn't chug at 2fps the second you fire a shotgun or have two explosions on screen.

Connell: I wasn't even aware vertical run n guns were a thing!

So when were you first able to actually play these forbidden games?

Alicia: friend's houses, rare coins on cabinets and the shiny new Pentium 3 was around the time significant strides in emulation occurred. The first builds of winKAWAKS and NeoRAGE, the birth of SNES9x as an improvement over zSNES, Gens surpassing Genecyst and so on. Those plus purchasing a cheap 8-pin gamepad (then eventually a USB one!) made it much easier to start exploring all the aspects of game history I'd only been able to experience elsewhere or by poring over whatever magazines I could find.

Our first dialup access two years later allowed much easier exploration of the 80s titles. It took an entire day each to download the KOF 2000 and Metal Slug 3 ROMs when they were dumped for the first time.

Connell: Ah yes, regional dialup speeds.

Alicia: Hey they quintupled when we upgraded to ISDN! TEN whole kbps!

Connell: So was gunstar heroes a game you beat in that time?

Alicia: Yeah it was one I'd played at around 9 years old one school holidays then I went back and played through all the Mega Drive Treasure games in a row at 12 or so. At 9 I was mostly excited to work out that lightning+fire gave you a lightsabre. By 12 I'd figured out I never need to go in on enemies if I can deal consistent DPS while moving on my own terms with lightning+chaser

Connell: You mentioned treasure games buck against the conventions of the genre. Is that what you find appealing in their games? Or is it more than that?

Alicia: On a basic level an action game with appealing sights and sounds is replayable on its own. There's some distinctly weird game design flavour to a lot of their work that makes them such a unique set of games to play. They're kinda the natto or vegemite of action games a lot of the time. Gunstar Heroes was one of their earliest works and in many ways plays things fairly safe.

Even so you see some of their desire to play with conventions from the get-go. If you play the first four stages in their default order then the first stage has a mid-boss which can heal itself if you play too scared. The second level's an autoscroller with a bossrush which can include up to seven fights depending on the difficulty. There's a board game stage which takes forever and you may not even see the genuinely funny joke squares you can land on. There's humanoid enemies who follow the same post-damage invulnerability frames you do. There's so many boss rush sequences.

If you play the rest of the company's library you can see the birth of some of their weirder or meaner games in how this game plays. Alien Soldier's one gigantic boss rush and has a control scheme expanding on the minecart autoscroller for some reason. The various beat 'em up mechanics (proximity throws, the hidden 41236+Shot slide) are the sorts of things Silhouette Mirage and Mischief Makers expand on. The game's desire to keep stretching out its length gets to some serious extremes by the time you're onto Sin & Punishment.

Even the regular conventions established by this game such as previewing a boss's moveset in text form before each fight start getting subverted down the line. Radiant Silvergun's descriptions are almost entirely bizarre jokes, culminating in the final boss just advising you to pray.

Connell: Haha

Alicia: Over time the Treasure quirkiness can become a bit grating if you aren't in the right mood. Silhouette Mirage demands meticulous positioning to ensure your sprite is facing the correct direction for the desired energy properties you need. Alien Soldier makes you feel like an unknowable master of alien kung-fu by having controls designed for an alien. Dynamite Headdy's pacing is all over the place. Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga are Match-3 puzzle games disguised as shmups. Some of their games are just so goddamn long.

Connell: I've always wanted to give their N64 platformer a try

Alicia: Oh I can lend you a Mischief Makers cart. That game's a delight.

Thanks again to Alicia for the fascinating insights! Also how dare you be a more eloquent writer than me on my own blog. You'll be hearing from my lawyer.