Shoot em Up Game Time - Recca (Summer Carnival 92) [NES]
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SHOOT EM UP GAME TIME
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Recca (Summer Carnival 92) - Naxatsoft - 1992
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Summer Carnival '92: Recca (Japanese: サマーカーニバル'92 烈火), commonly referred to as Recca (meaning "raging fire"), is a 1992 scrolling shooter video game developed by KID and published by Naxat Soft for the Family Computer.
The game was developed by programmer Shinobu Yagawa, who would later work on games like Battle Garegga, Pink Sweets, and Ibara. The music for the game was composed by Nobuyuki Shioda. As its name indicates, Recca was created for a shooting game competition called the "Summer Carnival" by Naxat Soft, which took place on July 17, 1992.
The game was known for having high sprite counts while maintaining fast speeds. Recca is described by shoot 'em up fans and reviewers as one of the toughest games in history, if not the toughest on the NES. Although it is a little-known game, Recca is one of the few games that pushes the hardware of the Famicom console to its limits. For example, the game shows sprites for effects (like explosions) at 30fps instead of 60fps to work around the sprite limitations of the system.
It features a varied weapon power up system consisting of a primary and secondary weapon, both having 5 weapons to choose from. This can give you a high number of combinations to tackle various situation, throughout my playthrough i preffered to use the "L" Laser primary weapon and the "S" Seeker secondary weapon, this gives you power with the laser and the seeking ability of the secondary weapon to clean up any missed enemies.
Each weapon can be upgraded 3 times to give you quite a lot of firepower, if you do die, there are lots of powerups to quickly get you back up to full power. Although once fully powered up the excess items can become a problem as you have to maneuver between them so you dont lose your favourite combination. Another nice feature that adds extra complexity is the Shield/Bomb. If you stop firing you primary weapon, the shield/bomb will charge up, this absorbs standard enemy fire (not lasers/missles) which can help out massively in a lot of the boss fights, and when this is fully charged you press fire and it releases a bomb blast that has a good splash distance and again is very effective in boss fights, and adds extra tactics to the game.
The music is excellent, it is the perfect music for a frantic shoot em up, fast paced and electronic, some of the best music i have heard on the NES, Stage 2 music stands out.
In total from starting to play this game it took 16 hours 30 mins, i highly reccomend this game to any fan of shoot em ups. Played on a NTSC Model NES-001.
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