The Gamer's Quarter

[Shapermc]

After Giga Wing and Giga Wing 2, Takumi decided to make an interesting shooter for the PS1 titled Night Raid. It is one of those games that stayed up around the $50 and I never got a chance to play. Did anyone ever get to play it? Anyone have it?
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[GSL]

Yo. Apologies for the grainy Palm camera image.

It's funny--I've seen a few reviews of the game online (IC has one; can't remember the other one) but I've never met a real live person who's ever heard of the game before. It's, uh... really, really interesting, and I mean that in a good way.

First off, it's really cool, graphically. The game reminds me of Radiant Silvergun in its blending of polygonal and sprite-based characters, and it really shows off the power of the Playstation in its later years, with very little slowdown. The backgrounds are all these weird, abstract vistas with lots of trippy 3D shit floating around in them--also like some of the later RSG levels.

The music is also really, really cool. As opposed to your typical techno-type tracks or chirpy chiptunes, Night Raid has a really amazing crunching hard rock soundtrack to it, something that really gets your blood pumping to blow things up.

Okay, so gameplay. First off, it's a Takumi shooter, which means a complicated scoring system involved on chaining little medallions, curtain fire, and a freaking sixteen-digit score counter. You also only take damage from colliding with a bullet--your ship passes right over every enemy, provided they don't choose that moment to send a barrage of pink firepower up your tailpipe.
The scoring system is really, really bizarre. For every enemy you kill, they drop one or more little collectable triangle thingies. A meter on the left side of the screen keeps track of how many you've collected, and obviously there's a score multiplier involved with the more you collect. Collect one, the meter goes up by one. HOWEVER. Miss collecting a triangle, and the meter goes down. Miss collecting a whole bunch of triangles, your meter goes to the negative, and your score will actually start decreasing. It is indeed possible to finish a level with a negative score, and in fact the game provides not one but three different hi-score tables: One for the highest scores, one for the lowest negative scores, and one for 'near-zero', basically, the closest to a flat zero score you can come by alternately collecting and ignoring the little score triangles.
Of course, you have your standard powerup tokens, but what really helps is the "Hug Launcher" attack. While I'm not entirely sure how to go about pulling it off, it basically involves tapping the Hug Launcher button while the screen is full of enemies, and watching as your ship does a nice impression of a pinball, careening from enemy to enemy and destroying them all. The advantage of this is, aside from its smart-bomb capability, is that you collect triangles as the enemies release them, so it's extremely helpful if you're playing for a high score.

The game is a bit of an oddity--released as a Playstation title in 2002, against all speculation that if it got a console port, it would be on the PS2. The game was also self-published by Takumi instead of Capcom as with all of their previous offerings, and the publishing costs combined with a relatively small print run could be the reason we're not seeing much of Takumi anymore.

All in all, it's quite a fun game, and if you can find it for $50 or less after shipping, it's not a bad deal at all, especially if you enjoy games with complicated scoring schemes.

EDIT: My bad--the Hug Launcher does not facilitate the collecting of triangle thingies; however, the paths traced by the player's ship during the Hug Launcher attack convert to the triangles after the combo is stopped, hence the strategy involved in getting as many ricochets as possible.

[Fred]

Hug launcher is a good name for anything. ANYTHING.

[OtakupunkX]

Any game that involves a Hug Launcher and ins't a sequel to Moonwalker sounds like an instant classic.

[J.Goodwin]

[OtakupunkX]

It wasn't a bad game at all. It's just creepy as hell. Granted, I tend to have a weird outlook on things, but still.

[J.Goodwin]

[GSL]

'Hug Launcher' just sounds really bizarre and out-of-place for the game, but I have no idea what else it could possibly translate to. I've seen a few reviews call it a 'Hog Launcher', but as the Japanese is ハグランチャー, that doesn't fly at all. Maybe it's referring to a flying-tackle sort of hug?

Also, Shaper: I totally forgot, but Night Raid is not a PSX original title, it was actually a port from Taito's GNet arcade hardware. It was a system that used PCMCIA-like cards to store the game data, which were then swapped Neo-Geo (or Atomiswave, or NAOMI, or PGM, or...) style. Other notable games running on the system were the first Shikigami no Shiro, Triangle Service's mediocre XII Stag, and several oddball varieties of P s yvriar.

[OtakupunkX]

[J.Goodwin]

[OtakupunkX]

[wourme]

[J.Goodwin]

[quote="wourme"]

[wourme]