Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
59A playthrough of T&E Soft's 1992 shoot 'em up for the Nintendo Game Boy, Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS (地球解放軍ジアース).
Despite the game only being released in Japan, the entire thing is in English. Not that it matters, since there's little of consequence ever written on screen.
I played through the entire game on the default difficulty level.
ZAS is a really cool shooter that did some extremely impressive things with the old Game Boy. The game play is bog-standard, but done well - it's essentially a vertically-scrolling clone of classics like Gradius and Raiden. It's difficult, but fair, and it throws *a lot* of stuff at you at a time with no slowdown whatsoever. Actually, Nintendo's own SolarStriker is probably just as good of an example, and it's on the Game Boy.
The real star here is the graphics. ZAS does things that you wouldn't believe were possible if you hadn't seen it with your own eyes. Nearly every level makes heavy use of parallax scrolling - some of the stages have several layers comprising the backgrounds at different points, and are even used to display specific one-time animations (I still can't believe it when I see that meteor flying by at the end of the first stage - what a cool detail to only be used once!). The first stage gives an excellent example overall of how it does things with the heavy star belts separating you and the base background layer. It does transparencies regularly with cloud effects (eat your heart out, Tyrian in Pentium mode!). it does magic, seriously.
It also feels in a lot of ways like a precursor to T&E Soft's equally impressive Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy.
And it's a perfect fit for the shader that I'm recording with. The effect is achieved by heavily exploiting the poor refresh rate of the original Game Boy's LCD display. The layers are done through a controlled flickering: each layer is displaying at 30hz and is displayed every other frame to interleave the image, creating a pretty seamless effect on a screen that isn't good enough to reveal the compromises being made. Heavy smearing and ghosting become a means to a fantastic tech demonstration - who would've thought? Of course, when you aren't playing it on the original hardware - for example, if you are playing it in an emulator on a modern LCD display, you'll see the flickering so badly it'll give you a headache - the illusion is utterly ruined. This shader is mimics the original LCD's response timing, so the effect looks just like was intended to. (Retroarch is godly for things like this - check out the DMG shader to get this look). This video isn't recorded from an emulator that's interpolating the frames to fake the effect, which effectively halves the framerate. It's rendering 60 individual frames per second, and the shader is processing them like the screen would have displayed them.
I could go on and on and on about ZAS's virtues, but seeing is believing. It's great.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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