Game 464: Gun.Smoke

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Ok, guys. Just because you can make your shmup with unlimited continues unreasonably punishing doesn't mean you should. I know this won't be the last arcade game to give up all pretense of fair play and be a player burner intended to be beaten with perseverance and deep pockets rather than skill, but at least later games commit to that by letting you continue immediately on the spot and power through that ridiculous boss fight, rather than make you repeat it from the start each time, sans power-ups, as if you have a chance.

Gun.Smoke combines elements of Capcom's prior shmups 1942 and Commando, though it owes more to the former despite the on-foot setting of revolvers and cowboy boots; it's a continually forward-scroller where your P-38 Lightning is replaced by a cowboy who can't stop walking northward, and while you can shoot in six different directions based on whichever combination of three action buttons you press, all of them are some degree of "in front of you."

Like Commando, enemies aren't bound to 1942-like attack formations and can behave unpredictably - you are locked into your steadfast march forward, but enemies can and will slip past you, turn around, and shoot you in the back. Or just pop in from the lower-end of the screen side edges and shoot you in the back. It's a worst-of-both-worlds situation for your own survival, and when you also have Commando-level enemy aggression, bullet spam, and obstructive terrain with endless area denial attacks from dynamite-tossing Indians, you're going to be using those unlimited continues. Lots of them.

And that's before you have to fight the bosses, artfully introduced at the start of the game as a flyby of wanted posters.

I had beaten Commando, which doesn't allow continues, with the use of a single save state right in the middle of the game. I needed two save states to reach the midpoint of Gun.Smoke and I still couldn't beat the boss there, a firebreathing carnival freak named Pig Joe. And I don't think I want to.

As with 1942, I've made a video of the attempt, but edited out several minutes of repeated failures where I made no progress. These are mostly against the bosses.

 

Level 1 starts off gently enough, with no more than three or four gunslingers, snipers, or riflemen on screen at once as you take back the besieged town. At least not until you reach the gang leader, Master.

Destructible barrels grant powerups - boots enhance your speed, bullets enhance your firepower, and rifles extend your range. Trying to take time to shoot them while dealing with bad guys can be tricky, but you'll want at least one of each before reaching the boss, or indeed any other boss. You might also find a horse, but holding onto it before reaching the stage boss is always a challenge, and if you die fighting a boss, you're not getting another one.

Master is the only boss I've ever reached with the horse, and he's not too bad if you're fully powered up. Just focus on the underlings when he's prone, hang back far enough to give you room to dodge his bullets, and gun him down when he stands up.

Is that a cowboy or a hopping vampire?

 

Level 2 suggests a train robbery.

Stay away from the edges. It seems safe, but baddies love to spawn there.

The boss, Roy, throws knives faster than his men can shoot bullets. And here, the real nightmare begins - bosses are downright cheap. Starting with Roy, you face overwhelming enemy spawns during boss fights, but on top of that you have to deal with the boss himself who takes multiple hits and has absurd invulnerability frames as he hops around the screen, pummeling your personal space with barely telegraphed projectiles that you couldn't possibly react to.

 

Your only way to survive is to never, ever stop moving, but also make sure you don't move into any of the bullets that rain on you from all directions and tend to get lost in the background. Sometimes you can shoot his throwing knives down, but counting on it will get you killed.

It gets worse. It gets much worse.

Narrow banks and bridges around this river hideout mean little room to dance with these bandits. Just getting to the end feels like a matter of lucky spawn patterns - if too many appear in places you can't hit, you get swarmed and die. If one appears on the same edge of the river as you, you get hit and die.

And the ninja boss at the end is a real bastard too.

He's like Roy but worse. He spends most of his time in the air, invulnerable, and even when he lands, he's still invulnerable for a few frames. You can't take your sights off him or you'll miss your window to land damage. Except you have to, because the screen is being flooded with bullets from his minions. But focus on them and the ninja will hit you with a shuriken. It's insane.

I had to use a save point at the start of this fight to get through. Even reaching it from the checkpoint with a powerup set (boots, bullets, and rifle) felt like a matter of luck.

Stage 4 in comparison isn't so bad - it's a wide open valley with a fight against a boomerang-throwing bushwhacker. Things quickly get horrible again in the next one, a burned-out town, which is where I finally gave up.

Sigh. Why's your range got to be so short? Forget hitting the broad side of a barn; these bullets couldn't pass the broad side of a barn, and I've got to move up the screen to get close to Pig Joe, which is usually fatal. And why do my bullets just go through him nine of of ten times? Is this some i-frame nonsense, or just run-of-the-mill sponginess?

I had another save point here, but after a good hour and a half of dying and reloading, I tried another tactic - leave the window snipers alone so that more mobile enemies don't spawn in their place. It worked, but it just meant I had to keep myself on the far right edge of the screen with no way to dodge Pig Joe's fire breath.

 GAB rating:

I hated this game. 1942 was more or less balanced but overlong and repetitive, but Gun.Smoke just feels cheap and predatory when it isn't also overlong and repetitive. Even on a cheatless "tutorial" playthrough, put together by a player who obviously knows the game inside out and can tell you exactly where to go, what barrels to shoot, and the tricks you need to use to beat each boss, there are still many cheap deaths and edited-out game overs - so many that he claims the Wolf Chief fight on stage 6 took almost nine hours of failures before having a minute-long success, and I'm not sure that's an exaggeration. It's worse than Ghosts 'n Goblins, which I have similar feelings about (and didn't/won't cover).

Unlike Ghosts 'n Goblins, the NES port of this one makes significant gameplay changes, such as adding the ability to buy powerups from townsfolk. By multiple accounts, it's much less punishing, and therefore more fun, than the arcade original. But I'm not interested in playing it myself.

Xanadu: Won!

 

I've only just realized something about Xanadu that I wish I had figured out much earlier. When you pause, your "defend" stat, which represents a product of your equipped armor class and your skill with it, is a direct representation of damage negation potential. Take an enemy's strength value (revealed with spectacles), subtract your defense stat, and that's roughly the median value of damage you can expect to suffer per hit. This is important throughout the whole game, because the best way to raise your defense is to find something that can hurt you, but just barely, and let it hurt you until it can't any more, and knowing the direct relation between defense and pain threshold would have taken out much of the guesswork.

And it's more important than ever now, because there's nothing left for me to do except get my defense high enough to survive the Dragon God's attacks for a few seconds. No other enemy poses a threat to me; my attack strength is as high as it can get, and I have death magic plus 38 invulnerability items to use against anything too dangerous to approach, either because they use magic themselves (which ignores your defense) or because they're quick and hard-hitting.

But I must get hurt to make progress, and with my own defense at 319,000 points, the only melee-based enemy on level 9 that can harm me are Volts which have 500,000 strength, which means a median of 181,000 damage per hit, and I won't survive that long. I must move on.

A partial level 10 map. This is a good place to save Winged Boots for.

 

Searching for a good training monster is troublesome. I find:

• Aarakocras - flying devils who cast death magic, but cannot hurt me at all up close.
• Sylphs, who are completely harmless but curse you if you kill them.
• Berserkers, with 500,000 strength.
• Medusas, who have Tilte magic (which is almost as bad as death magic) and also can't hurt me up close.
• Isis, who teleports around and casts death magic. 
• Copper Dragons, who have 965,000 strength.
• CZ-812CE robots, who have 990,000 strength. 

 

Level 10 also has its share of dead-end traps. You need a Fire Crystal to warp out of this one.

Things look bad until I reach the tower again and find one last monster type - salamanders, who at 327,000 strength, can hurt me, but not instantly kill me. I just need to be careful to ensure they attack me head-on and not from the sides.

Chests are your friends, but also be careful not to kill the last survivor too soon.

 

Even better, they sometimes drop those wall-bypassing mantle items, which are surely the rarest consumable item in the game. With two in my inventory, I can raid the tower again and grab that elusive Large Shield+7 along with a few other knick-knacks in otherwise inaccessible cubbyholes.

With this shield, whose protection value is initially lower than the trained small shield it replaces, I realize something. I can deliberately equip a weaker shield to lower my defense while still having my Battle Suit equipped, and squeeze out a few more armor points out of an enemy that otherwise wouldn't be able to hurt me any more. Now I wish I had held onto my old shields instead of selling them once something better came along, but I've still got my Small+7 and a Large +5.

I'm able to get my armor skill up to 169 using this technique against the salamanders. That's still not good enough to survive blows from the next enemy up on the food change - berserkers - but it's good enough to let me warp down and suffer hits from the Darkstalkers, who had been killing me previously. It's a good thing I kept some alive.

This gets my armor up to 179, and I realize that my shield skill is a weak point, so I downgrade my armor and fight some 150,000 strength Garlerduhrs head-on, first equipping my Dragon Slayer to ensure I don't kill them accidentally.

I do go through a number of potions.

It's a painfully slow process, but it gets my shield skill up. I simply wait in front of the creature and heal whenever necessary, and eventually the damage stops entirely. Then I downgrade my armor again and repeat. At 149 shield skill points, it can no longer hurt me even with the worst armor equipped. Similar tactics against a 180,000 strength Variyka gets it to 179, but by the time I hit that, I'm down to my last two potions.

Combined with the battle suit, this gives me just over 600,000 defense points. That's easily enough that the 500,000 strength enemies can't hurt me, but not high enough to fight the 965,000 strength enemies immediately above them. Further training is going to be awkward.

It turns out, this is enough to beat the Dragon God. But not by ramming into him with the underpowered Dragon Slayer. For once, you've got to use some of that action gaming finesse - the technique is to wait for him to approach, leap over his flame breath, and then descend, sword drawn. Your timing has to be absolutely perfect - it took me over 20 tries, and just barely survived on the successful attempt. Mercifully, the game auto-saves just before entering his lair, and a reload upon failure is free.

His stomp could kill me in four frames. That was three of them.

Your reward is a very slowly-scrolling text-only epilogue.

I have Google's AI mode translate this, but it also thinks this is the epilogue for Genji: Dawn of the Samurai for the Playstation 2, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt. 

"Your battle, recorded today alongside the words of the gods, has come to its end.
Your trials, a battle manifesting the Great Will, shall be celebrated with the cup of victory and become a crown of gold, blessed by the radiance of the heavens.

In this land, the long-standing cries of the people’s suffering have been removed, along with the seeds of evil, by the sword of the chosen one in your hand—the incarnation of the Great Will.
Behold, the grimly built mound of death is reborn as a magnificent monument, bringing brilliance back to the earth.
Its form, surrounded by walls and towers, shall reflect its presence upon the earth as a sign of wisdom, both within and without.

The figure of Kubla Khan, the great ancestor and king of Aisia, has been reclaimed.
Soon, the children of the earth will bow their heads once more, the young spirits of fragrance will dance with the wind, and the sacred flow of Alph, poured from the fountain of life, will nourish this entire land.

Hearken, for the flow that returns to the eternal end beyond human reach resonates in place of the voices of great ancestors; the laments and groans of the people will become a song of praise for you and the gods.
No longer shall anything be swept away, not even by the flow of frozen time.

However, since the time when heaven and earth were divided, the seeds of evil have sprouted like water.
Watered by the waves of sorrow and shed blood, they bear fallen fruit upon their branches.
Oh, the parched land, like a vast ocean of fury. Oh, their number, like the sands washed ashore.
Those who are blown upward will whisper a song of sorrow, played by countless souls.

That is the prayer of the people who seek you; there is the new land for you to till.
The tears of the gods that have flowed shall guide you. The sword shall never leave your hand.
O you who have been placed in the hands of the gods, until the time of your next journey, may you grant peace to your soul."

 

GAB rating: Average.

As an action RPG, Xanadu makes no sense. The action elements are there, but they're poor and almost unnecessary, from the strange combat mechanics to the unpleasant platforming. And it doesn't make much sense as an RPG either; it has the mechanics of one, but the steep power curve and closed economy means you'll be screwed if you play it like one. CRPG Addict bailed because of a combination of anxiety and boredom.

Viewed as an action-puzzle game, though, Xanadu makes a lot more sense, but it's one out of Tower of Druaga's school of design (albeit far less cruel than its master) where you're expected to play, fail, and replay with a bit more knowledge, until you know enough to plan out your victory and win. It anticipates Tower of the Sorcerer, as commenter Sunfall to-Ennien noted, which commits more fully to its RPG-like optimization puzzle concept with completely deterministic gameplay and a single intended solution. And like Tower of the Sorcerer, this trial-and-gotta-reset-the-entire-game-error gameplay isn't going to appeal to everyone.

I don't automatically hate this approach, and Xanadu turns out to be a lot more lenient than I initially assumed, but it has one big problem, apart from its comparatively minor friction points like clunky controls, annoying platforming, pointless items, needlessly cruel karma system, insane late-game food consumption rates, ugly graphics, and repetitive music and sound. It's kind of boring. Boring and overlong and stuffed with filler. You could cut the level sizes in half, including the dungeons, and lose nothing of importance, but you've got to explore every inch and fight the majority of enemy encounters up to four times to ensure you've got enough experience, skill, and gold/items to take on the next one, and that gets tiresome pretty quickly.

I suppose in the context of 1985, when you don't have a million other RPGs to play on your Sharp X1 or PC-88, Xanadu's sheer size could be seen as a good thing, but it leaves me wanting less.