GO SEGA
The venerable game-maker and once-upon-a-time console giant SEGA is turning 65 this October. Just five years ago, to commemorate its 60th anniversary, Sega released a set of four digital-only games via Steam in October 2020, available for a limited time. Now long-since delisted, these games have caught my eye once again lately and I'd like to share them with you, lest they be forgotten to the flow of time.
Before we dive in, I'd like to reference the archived official sega60th.com site, via the Internet Archive. The GO SEGA 60th Anniversary celebration is expansive far beyond just these four games, and by diving into the official site (or a saved copy of it, at least) you have a chance to see a little more of it. Sega Retro also has an excellent page that documents the GO SEGA promotion here, and it's a treasure-trove of some of the content drops that Sega released as part of the celebration. Visiting the Sega Retro pages for each of the four games we'll talk about here (and in the follow-up piece) will also provide an archived link to their Steam pages, which I will also include by the header of each game as we come to them.
ℹ️ With the exception of Golden Axed (which has its own history we'll talk about later), these are all free, simple games meant to celebrate Sega's history. I can't confirm the exact time or budget allowed to make any of them, but I can't imagine it comes anywhere close to full commercial releases. While I have my share of praise and critiques for each of these titles, on a foundational level I just appreciate that these games even exist as gifts to us Sega fans.
Without further ado, let's look at each game in order of release!
Armor of Heroes
Developer: The Eccentric Ape, Sega
Release date: October 15, 2020
The basics
Armor of Heroes is a top-down tank battle party minigame themed after Sega's Company of Heroes series. The game's designed for quick, straight-to-the-action play against human or CPU opponents in short rounds lasting a couple minutes or even less.
My time with Armor of Heroes was spent competing against computer opponents, so I was unable to experience the full party multiplayer aspect--but I think I got the gist of the game nevertheless. Put nicely, it's a serviceable top-down tank party game, the kind you've probably played in some other form via a mobile or Flash game--or even as a retro computer game if you're really old. Armor of Heroes is rudimentary and threadbare in terms of content but does what it sets out to do. You use the joystick for appropriately tank-controlled movement, and bumpers to rotate your turret--a merciful separation between movement and aim, especially if you've played tank games that merge the two together.
The game offers a roster of three different tank types, four stages of varying environment and size, and three game modes: Deathmatch with respawns and a timer, Survival with a stock of lives, and Score Zone with a moving king-of-the-hill type area that grants you points. But the most interesting thing Armor of Heroes does to differentiate it from games like Wii Play's Tanks! is the addition of realism "configurations" as the game calls them.
The realism options
- In Arcade mode, each player's tank is color-coded with rings that indicate position and armor level, your turret has a colored line that shows the trajectory of your shots, and your shots themselves are brightly lit in your player color, looking like flares or fireworks as they travel.
- Tactical mode retains all of the above UI indicators but removes all of the color-coding. Everything is now a ghostly white, including the rings around your tank that show you where you are. So I hope you're good at tracking objects onscreen because that's the only way you'll be able to tell what dark-brown smudge with a white ring around it belongs to you versus your opponents.
- Hardcore mode gets rid of everything. No position or armor indicators, no shot trajectory, no color-coding... nothing. Now it really is a challenge to track your shadowy smudgy rectangle and figure out where your shots will go.
In theory, the realism settings make for progressively more tactical play, compelling you to carefully track friendly and enemy tanks, plan shots, and use the detailed environment as camouflage. In practice, anything beyond Arcade mode can feel excessive for a top-down tank party game where you have to shoot each other as much as you can in two minutes. One-life no-time-limit Survival mode duels on Hardcore could have the same sort of niche appeal as 1v1 Halo sniper battles were, but the overall appeal of Tactical and Hardcore modes may be otherwise limited.
Too detailed?
That said, the settings are at least interesting to talk about after suffering through a few rounds of "where the heck is my tank... where the heck are the other tanks... and where the heck are my shots going?" The in-game graphics look great, and are surprisingly detailed for the style of game. I can't help feel like it was an intentional choice for the models, environments, and effects such as shadow, fire, and snow to be so detailed to the point of interfering with your visibility. It results in stealth tactics and camouflage being effective, especially on Hardcore mode, even if actually playing that way is less than fun.
Anyway, R.I.P. my graphics card, which got noticeably hotter playing this game, and the unnecessarily detailed water effects and environment destruction that were partially the cause. I didn't expect a free tank minigame to give my GPU such a workout, but here we are.
ENDLESS Zone
Developer: The Eccentric Ape, Amplitude Studios
Release date: October 16, 2020
Game structure™
Next up is ENDLESS Zone, or technically ENDLESS™ Zone, which is straight up Fantasy Zone with ENDLESS™ Space theming. As a shmup fan myself, I was excited to check this one out, and the Steam page's screenshots that showed off the beautiful illustrated art and slick menu UI had me sold.
So for those unfamiliar with Fantasy Zone, let's go over the basics: ENDLESS™ Zone drops you in an infinitely-scrolling horizontal level that you can freely explore. Interspersed throughout the level's length are spherical "objective" enemies that you must destroy in order to bring out the stage boss. Beat that boss and you move onto the next stage to repeat the process.
The game ramps up in a couple different ways. First off is the natural difficulty increase from level to level across the game's four stages. Second is a gradually increasing enemy spawn rate the longer you spend in any given level. In order to keep up, you use coins that sometimes drop from destroyed enemies to spent at the shop--a floating ship that activates when you touch it, so long as you can reach it before it disappears.
Ship upgrades™
Ship upgrades are the key to managing ENDLESS™ Zone's, let's say, classic arcade approach to difficulty. Your collected cash can go to weapon upgrades, special weapons, movement speed, and extra lives. These upgrades are not optional™ if you want to get far in ENDLESS™ Zone, with your starting ship rocking a peashooter primary fire, serviceable bomb secondary, and a ship move speed that's leisurely to put it nicely. Put a little less nicely, it's like the starting ship from Gradius but with an even worse primary shot. Upgrade soon, upgrade often.
Anyway, there's a cool visual aspect to your upgrades as well, where many of them will visibly augment your ship in some way, with primary weapon upgrades adding doodads to your front guns, and movement speed upgrades adding bigger, more powerful-looking thrusters to your ship. Details like this really reinforce the feeling that your upgrades make a difference and that you've grown stronger from the beginning of the game to the end of it.
The problems™
- Everything has rather large hitboxes. Your ship, enemy projectiles, and enemies themselves are all quite large, and you'll take plenty of damage from collisions as you learn exactly where hitboxes begin and end.
- The difficulty ramp-up is swift and significant. The enemy spawn increases are aggressive, and make time losses a compounding mistake. Spending too much time moving around to grab coins or looping around an objective enemy will consequently make doing those things quickly even harder when there's more enemies onscreen.
- The lives system is pretty strict. Your health is a simple one-hit-one-life approach that starts you off with 3 lives (that is, your 3rd hit is game over, no continues). Any more lives have to be purchased from the shop, which means less money to go around for truly important ship upgrades.
- Primary fire upgrades have limited ammo. If you don't maintain good game econ to buy refills, you could actually get weaker when you run out and revert back to the default peashooter, all while the game continues to get harder.
- The starting ship's low stats make early-game a bit of a slog. Starting ship stats are poor in every category, making for a painful experience when you encounter a game over and lose all your upgrades. Your slow primary fire speed and movement make the first moments of a fresh run simply frustrating as you rush for your first set of upgrades for a more playable experience.
- There are a couple of playability issues and oddities. A gameplay-affecting bug occasionally renders your i-frames after death or shop exit nonfunctional, leading to death when you're supposed to be invincible. Certain projectiles can get lost in particle effects, such as the explosions from destroyed enemies or the smoke and flame effect from your secondary fire.
I love shmups but ENDLESS Zone, to me, just isn't very fun. There's little to compel me to push through the unforgiving arcade difficulty and master the game, which is usually the best part about shmups. Like Armor of Heroes, ENDLESS Zone is functional (although with the bug and some handling/visibility issues, arguable a tad less so), but I'm acutely aware of how many other, better shmups there are vying for your attention, time, and effort. ENDLESS Zone isn't unplayable, but I'd question whether it's worth much of your time.
To be continued
Next time, we'll wrap up the retrospective with Streets of Kamurocho and Golden Axed, both doozies in their own right: Golden Axed for the commotion that surrounded its release, and Streets of Kamurocho possibly being my favorite of the whole set. Once the post is up, you can find it here to complete the journey!