The Shoot Up #31 - Final Soldier (PCE) menus & modes
1Final Soldier on PC Engine is *not* the final game in the long-running "Soldier" series of vertical shooters published by Hudson Soft. And I hadn't realized that Hudson didn't develop all of the PC Engine soldier games, of which "Final" is the second: Kaneko developed the first on PCE, "Super Star Soldier," "Now Production" developed Final Soldier, Hudson developed the third, "Soldier Blade," and Kaneko developed the "fourth," "Star Parodier" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAKWQDnn_Gk ).
0:00 - intro
0:24 - Set-up menu, where you can set the difficulty level, and choose one out of three variants for each weapon type--there's a pretty nice selection here
1:13 - Normal Game
23:37 - 2 Minute Game
25:47 - 5 Minute Game
Like the other PCE shooters I've recorded so far, the difficulty curve is more like a really wide valley with sheer cliff walls: you go for what feels like forever, just evaporating everything as soon as it appears on screen, until suddenly, in the last few stages, the game wakes up, swarms you with enemies, and in just about the blink of an eye I lose all the extra lives I'd built up for half an hour of boringly easy play, and it's game over. I suppose I'll have to try the game on the Hard difficulty some time to see if its difficulty curve is more interesting.
The 2 Minute Game and 5 Minute Game modes feel a lot more immediately challenging and fun by comparison! I like 'em.
Another thing I like are the bombs: you don't start with any bombs, but you pick up little slow-shooting Options that drift along behind you, and these are your bombs! Pretty nifty (although the fact you start out a life with zero bombs is one thing that contributes to running into a difficulty curve "cliff," since you can't bomb your way out of trouble when you respawn).
As I mentioned earlier, the weapons are configurable, which allows you, in effect, to weed out the bad ones; so although--as seems popular in PC Engine shmups--the game keeps sending weapon-switching "power ups" at you, which to me is annoying, none of them are really really terrible, thankfully, so being inadvertently switched to one isn't as big a worry as it is in some of the other shooters.
The backgrounds in this game are not the most attractive things; the stage 2 background (6:25) is so bright it's a bit harder than it should be to see your own ship. The panning water animation at 11:00 -- this might be stage 3 -- is so crude as to be pretty hard on the eyes. Fortunately, after that you go into the nice, dark background of space.
Recording: RetroFools RGB-modded PC Engine Duo-R, OSSC, Framemeister, Elgato HD60