1942 (NES) Playthrough
188A playthrough of Capcom's 1986 shooter for the NES, 1942.
1942 was Capcom's second arcade game, and when it became a major worldwide hit in 1985, it laid the foundation for what would soon become one of the gaming industry's most celebrated production houses.
The Nintendo Famicom was quickly picking up steam in the Japanese market at the time, and looking to capitalize on their newfound success, Capcom decided to dip a toe in the home console market. They commissioned a Famicom port of 1942, and when it came out a year later, it became the first console game to ever bear the Capcom name. It's a major cornerstone in the company's history.
The game is a World War 2-themed vertically scrolling shooter, and the campaign depicts eight major Pacific theater battles (beginning at Midway and ending at Okinawa) and spans thirty-two stages. You have been tasked with defeating the Japanese air force, and your P-38 fighter comes equipped with upgradable machine guns and a nifty "loop the loop" maneuver that grants a temporary reprieve from enemy fire.
The arcade game is exactly what you'd expect from an early scrolling shooter that followed in the wake of Xevious, but it was a good-looking game with solid controls, a fun gimmick, and an interesting theme. It's not hard to see why people loved it in its time.
The Nintendo game features the same levels and gameplay mechanics and looks reasonably good in screenshots, but it's of such poor quality that those things don't really matter. Not only does it fail to capture any of the fun or excitement of the arcade game, but it's also fundamentally broken.
It was made by Micronics, and boy, does it show! The framerate tops out somewhere around 15 fps, the game drops frames in busy scenes, and nothing ever feels smooth in motion. The choppiness is distracting and makes tracking planes and bullets difficult, and the background color choices make it virtually impossible to see what's going on whenever you're flying over anything that's not water.
But the real game-breaker is the controls. The plane handling is manageable once you adjust to how twitchy and framey it feels, but the shooting is seriously messed up. The fire button only works when it wants to. You can hear the shot noise when you hit the fire button, but the gun often fails to actually fire. If an enemy is flying at you, you can't reliably fire a single shot in its direction, so the only viable way to play is to mash the button as fast as humanly possible and pray that the dropped inputs don't screw you over at a critical moment. Did they tie input processing to the framerate or something? It's ridiculous that it was allowed to ship like this, *especially* when the game's scoring system emphasizes shot accuracy.
1942 is a game that is as unpleasant to play as it is to listen to, and it's an extraordinarily poor first showing for the Capcom name on the NES. They figured things out eventually, but man, some beginnings are a bit too humble.
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