[AC] Gun Frontier - ALL Clear (No-Miss) + Rank Gadget
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Gun Frontier came out in arcades in 1990 and was made by Taito, one of the most prolific arcade shmup developers of the time.
In terms of presentation Taito was way ahead of everyone else, they always had the coolest and most stylish games of that era.
While everyone else was doing generic military shooters here we have a cyberpunk wild west setting where you play as a flying gun shooting other giant guns.
Their soundtracks were also always top-tier, courtesy of ZUNTATA (no ZUNTATA here though).
This came out on PS4 and Switch about a week ago or so courtesy of Arcade Archives.
There was a Saturn port of this in 1997, but that port wasn't very faithful to the arcade since it had no rank among other things.
So essentially this is the first time this got a real port since the game came out 32 years ago.
Gun Frontier is the first game in a trilogy of Taito games.
This trilogy composing of Gun Frontier, Dino Rex and Metal Black.
All extremely good games made by mostly the same people. These people would then later start a little known company you might know by the name of G.rev. Interviews revealed Border Down was very much intended as a spiritual successor to Metal Black.
Dino Rex is kind of the odd one out here, being a dinosaur fighting game that is also somehow connected to the lore of the trilogy??? It's weird man.
This game is also special because it was the primary inspiration for Battle Garegga.
This was Yagawa's favorite game and you can see a lot of Garegga similarities in this. In the way the bomb system works, to the game starting with the stationary tanks that drop bomb fragments, down to the cloud background.
Also the rank. This game has a nuclear rank system like Battle Garegga that you need to manage if you want a chance at clearing the game.
The rank system was very mysterious in how it actually worked but it did eventually get cracked.
The shmups wiki page recently got all the details on it and it's pretty wild: https://shmups.wiki/library/Gun_Frontier/Advanced_Rank
These details seem very unknown, at least I've seen nobody actually dodging bomb fragments before? I mostly figured out these optimal strats by myself, but figuring it out was a lot of fun.
The main things you need to be aware off are:
- Rank increases dramatically the higher your shot frequency is. The highest you can shoot without getting a rank penalty is 6.6hz.
- Rank increases by one every 10 seconds and +1 for every full bomb in stock.
If you have five bombs in stock (which you'll have for the majority of the game), you're essentially quintupling the rank increase. Therefore avoid bomb fragments like the plaque.
From my experimenting I've found it's optimal to start collecting bomb fragments starting from stage 3. Stage 5 will always have very high rank no matter what you do, so it's more advantageous to get a few extra bombs for it to make it a lot more consistent. And the difficulty increase in stage 3 and 4 is negligible.
There's a plugin you can download for Mame that gives you a gadget that shows the actual rank, including the timer rank and rate interval for shot button presses.
Incredibly useful for actually tracking rank and figuring out how to best manipulate it.
You can download it here: https://ss1.xrea.com/nekoziman.s601.xrea.com/cheat/
The pixel art and effects in this game are out of control.
Bursting the dam to kill the stage 3 boss, the way those big tanks in stage 5 fall into the abyss below and that stage 2 waterfall are just so sick.
The waterfall is the main reason the game got greenlit and there is a crazy story behind it. The dude that made it had to work in his underwear in a 40 °C room where the pc would overheat every hour. He had to keep switching pc's and copying everything to floppy every time it's wild.
You can read more about this story and the circumstances around the game from this translated interview from the amazing folks over at Shmuplations: https://shmuplations.com/gunfrontier/
The gameplay in this game is probably one of the most unique I've seen in a shmup.
The dangerous enemies here aren't the bosses or midbosses, or even the medium enemies, it's the popcorn. The popcorn in this game are probably one of the most evil enemies I've seen in a shmup. They have very deliberate design to creep up on you while dodging your shots, and then circle around you while taking pointblank potshots at you from every angle. They'll fire bullets completely horizontal or even from behind you. They can even anticipate where you're going and fire bullets ahead of you. Where they spawn is also completely random. Beating this game requires you to be very intimate with how their AI works and how to deal with them.
00:00 - Intro
01:17 - Stage 1
03:21 - Stage 2
06:56 - Stage 3
10:42 - Stage 4
13:58 - Stage 5
20:46 - Stage 6
22:15 - Ending & Credits
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