The Tower of Retro-Babble: Toaplan

(pretty awesome) image from Gematsu

 

On we go to the works of Toaplan! Like Emerson Lake and Palmer, Toaplan was a video game “supergroup” comprised of the best designers from Crux and Orca. Okay, “best” might not be the right word, since neither Crux nor Orca made any arcade classics. (In fact, Orca’s Springer is one of the more miserable platformers from the early 1980s, an unsteady and over-encumbered design made worse by finicky jumping and collision detection. But, uh, that’s getting a little out of left field.)

Apart, Crux and Orca were not especially impressive. Together, the newly christened Toaplan was one of the most fondly remembered game designers of the late 8-bit and 16-bit eras of gaming. After a few stumbles out of the starting gate (Performan, designed for Data East, and Tiger Heli, which I’ll express my contempt for in the upcoming review), Toaplan earned a reputation for outstanding shoot ‘em ups, rivaled only by Konami and Compile. Fire Shark! Twin Cobra! Truxton and its even more awesome sequel! Occasionally, Toaplan would stray from that path with games in other genres- their frosty take on Bubble Bobble, Snow Bros., is dangerously close to a masterpiece- but generally speaking, Toaplan was the place to go for all your “blowing up aliens and Japanese fighter pilots” needs.

Toaplan’s games have a grungy feel, with urgent music pushed out of obnoxious digital instruments and a heavy use of gradient shading to boost detail and dimension. This meant that their segue to the Sega Genesis in its later years was almost flawless. Genesis ports like Snow Bros and Fire Shark mimic their arcade counterparts remarkably well, and Toaplan even upped the ante with a remake of ALCON (Slap Fight MD) with improved graphics, deeper gameplay, and a soundtrack by master digital musician Yuzo Koshiro. You’ve got the Sega Genesis outpacing arcade games now! You Go-A, To-a!

Shortly after Snow Bros., Toaplan went bankrupt, and most of its talent migrated to Cave, another respected developer of shooters. (And Power Instinct, but you don’t have to play that.) The skin of Toaplan is currently being worn by the Embracer Group, as subsidiary Tatsujin. By the way, the next time the two games go on sale, I’d recommend snapping up Toaplan Arcade Collections I & II. It’s a solid pair of collections with smart QoL features (the information on either side of the screen comes in handy for games with more cryptic power-ups) and just a tiny bit of tweaking to get everything looking just right.

PERFORMAN
Played: In MAME

This is technically Toaplan’s first game, done under contract for Data East. It’s another one of those foolhardy attempts to bring Dig Dug topside for an overhead view adventure, and like Dig Dug II: Trouble in Paradise and Rug Rats, it doesn’t really work.

You are Performan. (Imagine Ultraman if he came from Temu and you’ve got the right idea.) He’s armed with a mohawk, which he can chuck at the steadily approaching robot enemies to destroy them. Alternately, you can throw it at an explosive battery, taking several androids out with one shot and scoring bonus points.

When you start to feel the pinch from approaching enemies, you can dive into the ground and dig around until you find a safe place to emerge… but the enemies can dig too, so it’s not much of a defense. On the plus side, there’s a ghost that haunts the underside of the playfield… catch him and you become temporarily invincible, and the enemies temporarily become your bitch.

Performan isn’t a bad first effort from the company, but hardly the pre-crash arcade classic Toaplan was hoping it would be. The android pursuers are annoyingly fast and persistent, the gameplay’s not particularly deep, and the dual-layered playfield adds more annoyance than nuance to the experience. Nobody demanded a return Performan-ce from this one.

TIGER HELI
Played: In a tiny hometown arcade, and also the NES

I’ll just put it on the table right now… this game sucks. It was the absolute last resort for bored gamers in my town’s short-lived arcade. When the line for the Choplifter machine went out the door (fair play, it was pretty awesome!) and the pinball machines weren’t doing it for you, your only option was… Tiger Heli. Miserable, life-draining Tiger Heli. The Bremelo of the ball, the chain-smoking, three hundred pound date that you had to take to the prom, because you just weren’t getting anybody else. (Don’t ask where that metaphor came from.)

You don’t play Tiger Heli. You try to play Tiger Heli, and it actively fights you at every step. The enemies’ shots are much too fast to realistically avoid, hidden bonuses require a million shots to reveal, and the wimpy machine gun you’re given by default jams if you dare to use turbo fire. I’m sorry, I was attempting to save my fingers some grief and find some enjoyment in the game, but I forgot that enjoying yourself is literally punishable by death in Tiger Heli. Did I actually run out of bullets? You do know that this is a video game, and I can have as many as I want, right? There’s not a shortage of pixel clusters that look like bullets.

There are power-ups in Tiger Heli. This is a 1985 game, so don’t expect to be blown away by them. In fact, don’t expect to blow anything away with the Mini Helis, revealed by collecting red and white crosses on the playfield. (Red Cross? I have a medical emergency… a severe fun deficiency. I blame Tiger Heli.) You’ll get them, they’ll stick around for a minute shooting tiny bullets either forward or sideways, they blow up from incoming fire, and you’re right back to your original weaksauce shot. Yaaaay.

The power-up mechanics feel a lot like Irem’s Image Fight or Jordan’s Thundercade, and neither game is one I’d regard as a high point in the genre. (No matter what the Japanese think. Sorry not sorry, but Image Fight blows!) This makes Tiger Heli the lead vampire in a family of shooters that suck. Not blood, the other thing. You get the idea.

Tiger Heli isn’t all bad. Mostly, but not entirely. The graphics have a palatable geometric look… they’re simple by Toaplan standards, but effective, particularly the diamonds that peek out of the ground and those vast expanses of ocean with their swirling white peaks. Also, when the Micronics port for the NES came out, nobody could honestly say that it sucked any more than the arcade game. They both suck; the NES port just sucks in an NES kind of way.

ALCON (aka SLAP FIGHT)
Played at: The Malt Shop in Mount Pleasant, where else?

Performan wasn’t so hot and the despicable Tiger Heli was ice cold, but ALCON (known by the wimpy-sounding title Slap Fight in other territories) gave players a first taste of the Toaplan that would eventually become the master of its craft. It’s not a great game, but it’s getting there.

ALCON is a vertical shooter, looking like a hybrid of Namco’s Xevious and Toaplan’s own Tiger Heli. It’s set in a distant science-fiction future, but the backgrounds are a bit more “lived in” than the simple geometric shapes of Xevious. Square metallic structures are joined by cottages in long abandoned streets and parched deserts. Playfield objects are touched with the careful detail and subtle shading that would become Toaplan’s trademark… it’s nowhere near the heights of Truxton II or OutZone, but again, it’s getting there.

Where ALCON falters is its use of a Gradius-like power up system. (Gradi-esque?) Glistening stars recovered from random enemies light segments of a gauge on the bottom of the screen. When the power-up you want is lit, press a button and you’ll earn it, at the cost of your collected stars. One of the power-ups, Side, increases your firepower with sidecars, but also increases the horizontal size of your ship. Good luck weaving that battle barge through the soup of bullets in the later stages! Other power-ups don’t give you an inconvenient badonkadonk, but seem less useful than the standard shot. Also, the “sticky” turbo fire from Tiger Heli returns, and is every bit as obnoxious.

The best way to play this game is on the Mega Drive. Slap Fight MD offers both the original game (in Toaplan’s usual near arcade perfect form) and an enhanced version with improved graphics, the ability to detonate sidecars in times of distress, making them less of a liability, and an appropriately spacey Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack. It has the unfortunate side effect of making the game seem even more like an overhead Gradius, but it’s Yuzo Koshiro at the keyboard, so I’m not complaining.

TWIN COBRA
Played at: The Malt Shop in Mount Pleasant, as always

Twin Cobra is arguably Toaplan’s first major success, and a big step forward in their ascension to shooter royalty. The graphics are a big step up from ALCON and Tiger Heli, with more of the lurid detail that players would come to expect from Toaplan. Your helicopter is twice the size and with double the detail of the one in Tiger Heli. The waves of tanks, choppers, and gun turrets that serve as your enemies are dressed in military green, metallic silver, and weather-worn bronze. Twin Cobra’s got that appealingly gritty and realistic GI Joe aesthetic that was extremely popular in the late 1980s. It looked great then, it still looks nice now, and it set the trajectory for Toaplan’s artists in their later games.

Then there’s the sound, which is… certainly sound! It’s got the same grating, twangy instrumentation as many games on the Sega Genesis, which meant that Toaplan made a smooth transition to that format, but also makes you kind of glad that you couldn’t actually hear it in arcades. It’s accompanied by serviceable if flat gunfire and explosions, which again benefit from the cacaphony of the arcade space. You could just barely hear them back in the day… and “just barely” is loud enough for this grade of sound effects.

Power ups have improved from ALCON and Tiger Heli, but are still fairly basic, with different colors offering different trajectories for your shot. Red is your standard vulcan cannon that fires straight forward, green is an unremarkable laser beam that also fires forward, blue is a spread shot (you want this one), and yellow fires in every cardinal direction, which is useless. You’ll have to grab several S emblems to make your weapons any more than functional, and the S emblems don’t want to be grabbed, dancing just out of your reach. It’s a weirdly user-hostile design, making an already tough game tougher in all the wrong ways. If you’re playing this in the Toaplan collection, use the dip switches and assists to balance things out, making the difficulty more manageable for those of us who experienced Twin Cobra when it first hit arcades. We’ve, heh, aged some since. (Try not to grimace when your system tells you for the 46th time that you’re not eligible for the leaderboards.)

Oh, I forgot to mention why this is called TWIN Cobra! Like Double Dragon, this game offers two player simultaneous gameplay, adding to the excitement while boosting your onscreen firepower. Two player action was becoming a standard feature in arcade games in 1987, and it’s especially welcome here. It’s not quite perfect, but Twin Cobra is the first truly excellent game from Toaplan… and things would only get better from here.

By the way, there were two home versions in America… a surprisingly decent NES conversion by Micronics (BWAA?!), and a less satisfactory port on the Sega Genesis. Toaplan usually nails arcade conversions on this system, but they farmed this one out to GRC, and the results speak for themselves. Mostly with gape-jawed “duhs.”

SKY SHARK
Played: On the NES. Unfortunately.

Awesome! Can I have this game?
Not the one in the box... THIS GAME.
(image from Giant Bomb, which the game in the box is)

Sky Shark had a memorable advertisement in video game magazines of the time… it showed a fighter pilot in World War II, his teeth crushed together in fierce determination and his wild eyes bulging from the tense life or death situation. Awesome! Can I get this for a home system?

Sure. You probably wouldn’t want to, though. Sky Shark on the NES was developed by Software Creations, and while it’s far from their worst NES game (that honor would go to Target: Renegade, which defiled Technos’ corpse before the company was even dead), it still leaves something to be desired. Like gameplay that lets you learn the ropes and enjoy it for a few minutes before spanking you bloody. What gives, Software Creations? (Oh, they made Silver Surfer too. That explains everything…)

Thing is, it’s not Software Creations’ fault that Sky Shark sucks. (For once.) That’s on Toaplan, because even in arcades, Sky Shark is a dismal, grinchy experience, and the company’s worst shooter since Tiger Heli. In contrast to Capcom’s 1943, which admittedly drank quarters like Kool-Aid but was an extremely player-friendly game, Sky Shark steps on your throat from go and does little to justify its cruelty with clever gameplay hooks or memorable graphics. The weapons are paltry (actually a significant step BACK from Twin Cobra!), the player’s ship dies in a single hit, and you will be dragged back to a checkpoint every time, with all of your power ups stripped away. It’s the Bizarro World version of 1943… while Capcom’s game invited players to keep going, Sky Shark actively repels them.

Admittedly, the graphics aren’t too bad. Enemy planes don’t merely explode, but catch on fire and drop like a bird with a broken wing first. Tanks leave smoking craters in their wake, and the stages have that usual Toaplan level of detail, with wooden docks perched over swamps and villages set behind dense jungle foliage. Hard to appreciate all that when the game insists on punching you in the gonads every other screen, though. You could give yourself hit points in the Toaplan collection (nice feature, by the way), but instead of pretending that this pretender is 1943, why not… just play 1943? I mean, it’s right there.

PYROS
Played: In some arcade, somewhere. Lansing Mall?

Sometimes, Toaplan would wander outside of its comfort zone with games that aren’t strictly shooters. Pyros (also called Wardner, which was the name it received on the Sega Genesis) is Toaplan’s take on the side-scrolling platformer, and just like with its shoot ‘em ups, it gives you maybe a screen’s worth of gameplay before it takes off the kid gloves and replaces them with brass knuckles.

As the plump Pyros, it’s your mission to rescue your girlfriend from the sinister Wardner and his goons. (Fantasia, my ass! This is the worst case of false advertising since “Make America Great Again!”) You can defend yourself with short-range fireballs, but Pyros folds in one hit if you can’t find a cape. A needle and thread lets you repair the cape once if contact with an enemy tears it, effectively giving you three hit points. Power ups also boost the length and strength of your fireballs, but be aware that Pyros is a chubby kid still in Wizarding 101, not Gandolf. Sheer firepower won’t get you through these tricky stages; only precise jumps and careful evasion of oncoming threats will.

The graphics are painted in muted greens and browns, with Pyros starting his adventure in a dense forest thicket and eventually infiltrating Wardner’s headquarters, a musty old dungeon with holes in the walls and a jagged spinning blade at the end of every long corridor. Nothing you see here will blow your mind, but it fits the medieval fantasy theme, making Pyros feel like the Hobbit game that nobody in the arcade industry bothered to release. The sound is of typical Toaplan quality (which is to say, unimpressive) and the brutal difficulty will crush all but the best players. Know that this trip to the Shire takes an extended detour through the House of Pain.

Pyros appeared on the Famicom Disk System in Japan, and also on the Genesis as Wardner. The latter game is remarkably close to the arcade original, but you already came to expect this from Toaplan after Fire Shark and Truxton. Toaplan’s arcade hardware and Sega’s 16-bit console hardware were so similar that Toaplan knew how to develop Genesis games before the system was even released! Talk about a head start!

FIRE SHARK
Played: On the Genesis. Fortunately!

Fire Shark has special significance to me as a Sega Genesis fan, because it was the first game I owned for the system that 1) Wasn’t Altered Beast, 2) Was objectively good (ie not DJ Boy), and 3) Scratched an itch for 1943 that had been left unsatisfied since I sold my Nintendo Entertainment System the year before.

Fire Shark isn’t really 1943, but rather Toaplan’s own take on the World War II shooter. There are some key differences, like how the formations of planes holding power-ups have been replaced with large, bullet spongey zeppelins, and how you have to collect three power-ups to boost your weapons. Okay, that design choice I could have done without (and of course, power ups dance around your ship, just begging for you to get clipped by a bullet while trying to grab them), but at least the three weapons in Fire Shark are pretty impressive… far more so than the wimpy bullet streams in Sky Shark. The standard issue wide shot spreads out with power ups, the beam shot pierces enemies and gets thicker when powered up, and the fire beam rakes a screen-long column of flame across your foes. It’s great even in its standard form… once it’s been powered up, the fire beam is unstoppable.

There was an arcade version of Fire Shark, but it’s not massively different from the Genesis version, right down to the twangy soundtrack. The graphics are sharper and a little less cramped, but really, there’s still plenty of detail to spare in the Genesis game, like the tiny Allied soldiers that meet you at the landing pad after every stage. The only meaningful difference between the two games is that in the arcade version, you immediately bounce back from a death as long as you have lives remaining. In the Genesis game, one hit lights your plane’s wings on fire, leaving the player to struggle for a couple of seconds before crashing to Earth. No, you can’t survive it. No, you can’t keep your progress through enemy territory… you’ll be sent back to a checkpoint. It’s a subtle change to the gameplay that’s not so subtle in practice. Credit feeding isn’t going to get you as far in the Genesis version, especially when you’re limited to a handful of them. And forget inviting a second player to join you... on the Genesis, that just ain't happening. Sigh... it's like MERCS all over again...

TRUXTON
Played: On Genesis

Truxton (aka Tatsujin) was one of the standouts in the early Genesis library, a vertical shooter with aspirations of arcade perfection. It comes close, you know. The famous skull bomb doesn’t look as cool and it’s not as difficult, but next to what was available on the NES, Truxton may as well be a carbon copy of the original. It’s close enough to the real thing that pointing out any differences would have been nitpicking, especially in the early 1990s. Trust me... after I bought my Genesis in 1991, I complained that the Genesis version of Altered Beast was missing details from the arcade game, and my brother rolled his eyes so hard they kept spinning for hours.

Truxton is the science-fiction counterpart to Fire Shark. The feel is similar, the aggravating “three power-ups to power up” system remains intact (and this time, it’s FIVE power-ups. Et tu, Toaplan?), and the smart bombs work in the same way. What’s different is the visual motif. You’re not fighting tanks and planes on a mid 20th century battlefield, but bugs and lumpy alien organisms in the void of space. The character designs aren’t eye-catchingly sleek like they would be in a similar Capcom or Konami game, but they’re at least functional… just not very memorable. The sound serves up that slightly grating Toaplan twang whether you’re playing it in arcades or on the Genesis, and again, it does the job.

The game’s earned some internet fame thanks to Classic Game Room host Mark Cussler’s low-key obsession with it. However, it’s the sequel that deserves all the praise. The graphics in Truxton II have been pushed to a Sega Saturn level of detail, the music is catchier, and the weapons that were already pretty cool in Truxton are far more devastating and impressive in Truxton II. It doesn’t take a century to power them up either! The game still drags you to a checkpoint without your power-ups if you die, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

HELLFIRE
Played: On the Genesis

"Dersh!"

Er, not that hellfire. THIS Hellfire is a side-scrolling shooter that feels like the long-lost descendant of SNK’s Vanguard. You don’t have instant control over where you fire, but pressing a button switches your aim from forward to backward to vertical to diagonal and back. Enemies comes from all angles, and some gun turrets are tucked away behind barriers, so you’ll have to frequently switch the direction of your gunfire to adapt to the ever changing, and ever hostile, environment.

It’s not a bad hook. Frankly, Hellfire would have been even better if it had been a twin stick shooter, but the kludgy aim switching works well enough. It’s the only way it COULD have worked on the Sega Genesis… the console port of the game was released before six button controllers, which meant that you were stuck with just three… one to fire your weapon, the second to switch your aim, and the third for a blast of flame that roasts anything in its path. This literal hellfire helps justify the game’s title and adds a strategic option to the Genesis game that wasn’t available in other versions.

The graphics in Hellfire are detailed, but rendered in muted hues, and a little muddled conceptually. So I was in space a stage ago, but now I’m in a Pharaoh’s tomb? It’s like I’ve flown into an Old Spice commercial from the 2000s. There are some nice special effects, like the ring of cannons on your ship that slowly rotates around it, and the color cycling for power-ups. The music also deserves praise. They’re the usual twangy Toaplan tunes, but they’re driving, intense ones… probably some of the company’s best work.

Hellfire isn’t on the level of a classic like R-Type or Gradius, but it’s up to Toaplan’s usual high standards, and for Genesis owners starved for content in the system’s unsure early days, that’s more than good enough. It’s also a tough game, nearly on par with that other Genesis ballbreaker Gaiares. Put on your big boy pants for this one, and a pair of asbestos pants over those just to be sure.

OUTZONE
Played: At the truck stop in Tekonsha MI

“Advance or die” is the general theme of this sharply rendered science-fiction shooter, seen from an overhead view. At first blush, it looks like Ikari Warriors or Heavy Barrel on steroids, but there are two key differences. The first is that there’s no “loop lever” (that hand-wrecking crank on the top of the joystick), so the player must collect C panels to alternate between free and fixed fire. Like Gunstar Heroes, free fire makes you more mobile, but fixed fire has the advantage of stability… you always know where your bullets are going to go, so you can concentrate on dodging rather than aiming.

The second twist is that your character runs on battery power, which quickly depletes as you play. You’ll have to keep moving, and keep collecting energy refills, if you want to stay alive. Finding a balance between efficient forward progress and not stumbling into a bullet or off a platform is what makes Outzone distinct from the dozens of other games in this genre. If you thrive in stressful situations, here’s your game. If you like to take your time and explore every nook and cranny of the environment, Outzone is NOT your game, and you’ll be punished for trying to play it that way.

The graphics are excellent, as you’d expect from Toaplan this late in its lifespan. Colors pop, enemy vehicles are huge, and the android soldiers eager to stop you are smoothly animated from all angles. The sound… is also what you’d expect from Toaplan, for whatever that’s worth. Expect lots of twangy sound effects and instrumentation that make you think you’re playing a Genesis game. No way a Sega Genesis could do this game justice in any other way, though. Even Grind Stormer was pushing it.

Outzone was followed up by FixEight, which featured eight playable characters, each with their own signature weapon. The graphics have been fluffed up a bit, with lots of color cycling effects, and there have been a few quality of life improvements. You’re no longer forced to hustle through each stage, and dying won’t send you back to a checkpoint. Beyond that, it’s largely the same experience, with more variety, brighter colors, and a beefy sound chip that’s better equipped to handle the rumbling explosions of an arcade game.

SNOW BROS
Played: In a convenience store not far from Chicago

Toaplan steps outside its comfort zone one more time with Snow Bros. If you wanted to be reductive about it, Snow Bros is a Bubble Bobble clone, with players clearing a maze-like screen of enemies. If you wanted to be accurate about it, Snow Bros is the best damn Bubble Bobble game ever made that’s not actually part of the Bubble Bobble series. As the titular (hee hee) snow brothers Nick and Tom, you’ll pack your Muppet-like foes in snowballs, then kick them, sending them madly careening around the screen. Pack TWO enemies in snow and kick one into another, and they bounce around the playfield in opposite directions, wiping out any monster unlucky enough to be in their paths and revealing valuable hidden prizes. It’s exciting, it’s addictive, and like any good Bubble Bobble clone, the arcade and Genesis versions can be played with a friend for maximum enjoyment.

Did I say “Genesis version?” Well, it’s technically a Mega Drive version, since we didn’t get the game in this country, but yes. As with most Toaplan games, Snow Bros makes an almost flawless transition to Sega’s most popular game system… the characters are a little smaller this time, but the backgrounds are brimming with chaotic color, and the gameplay loses nothing in the conversion to a home console.

Snow Bros was one of Toaplan’s last games, and there’s a refreshing sense of anarchic self-indulgence in its design. Goofy paintings of yokai leer at you from the walls, and the prizes are plates of sushi, rather than the more universally recognized fruit in Bubble Bobble. Some of those eccentricities were weeded out of the NES version of Snow Bros, and while it’s an acceptable downport, the arcade original and the Genesis port is the sweet spot for this one. If you’re going to enjoy this game, why not enjoy all of it?