【GB】Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS - Stage 1 - PC engine cover【Deflemask】
72Ever heard of ZAS on the Game Boy? This game ROCKS! It represents (almost) everything that I love about retro-gaming, well, about gaming in general to be honest... It's a short but sweet arcade-style shmup at just the right difficulty that pushes the Game Boy to its absolute limits! It doesn't get much more impressive than this on the old little grey brick... I mean seriously, would you look at that sweet Parallax Scrolling? It's bloody awesome! They've achieved that by swapping out the BGs on every frame and moving each of the BGs at a different speed, since the GB's screen is rather blurry you'd see 2 overlapping layers instead of a flickery mess, and it looks great! Very clever way to use a hardware's limitation to your advantage ;3
You should see some of the backgrounds in the later stages, they not only keep the parallax but even do cool tricks with the BGs like a wavy effect for example, it's damn impressive! Did I mention the screen-filling shape-shifting bosses?
It's not just in graphics that this game rocks the Game Boy's socks off, it's in the music as well! You may be familiar with my rather unorthodox use of the Game Boy's soundchip whenever I make music for it, I like to put the lead melody on the DAC channel (channel 3) as opposed to the usual bass which goes there in most Game Boy games, and that makes the Game Boy sound kinda-sorta like a lesser PC engine... This game does the same thing! All of the lead melodies from this game are on channel 3, that way it can make much more varied and more advanced-sounding lead instruments than it could on one of the pulse channels! This is one of those soundtracks that make you realise that the Game Boy has way better sound than the NES, it truly takes advantage of the GB's sound hardware, and because of that, covering it on the PC engine is its natural step forward ;3
I've had a request to cover a song from this game quite a long time ago, but here's the thing, I don't really do requests, although I'm open to suggestions I'll only do a song if I REALLY like it, and even then, by the time I got the request, I had already tried covering this song, but I just didn't finish it... Either way, sorry that I took too long to get around to it, it was really overdue!