Traditional arcade shooters have never been known for their length. After all, who’d want to play a button mashing shump for hours on end? Thus, typically most shooters are about a half-dozen levels in length, carefully balancing gameplay depth (read: freaking hard) with long-lasting replay due to the gameplay depth. This certainly is the case with Giga Wing, one of the numerous Capcom shooters that found their way to the Sega Dreamcast during the run of the console. On the surface, Giga Wing has all the right moves for a shump – intense shooting action, a steep difficulty, and only a few levels to complete in order to beat the game. However, while many console shooters/arcade ports tend to have one small detail – usually, they limit the amount of credits, forcing you to actually beat the game on skill rather than beat the game on infinite lives – Giga Wing falls flat, thanks to unlimited continues. Even if you completely suck at the game, you may blow through it within a half hour; with no effort whatsoever. No question that Giga Wing is a good shooter with plenty of memorable moments – it’s just that there is no reward for actually learning how to play the game.
Giga Wing does have some nice additions to slightly make the replay value more appealing – not only is there a 2 player co-op mode (a standard in most Capcom shumps), Giga Wing lets you choose from unique characters who have their own story to tell. It all revolves around war and some medallion that causes people to go crazy (so it’s like a medallion version of Soul Edge or something), but any more discussion about the storyline of a shoot ‘em up will do nothing but give you a migraine. Anyway, each of the different characters has a unique ship that plays very differently than the others, and all have their own version of the Force Bomb, a weapon that will end up being your primary firepower thanks to the bizarre difficulty curve. The levels remain the same, but the different performance of each ship does make for a differently playing game.
Otherwise, the main idea remains with Giga Wing – avoid the 3.8 billion bullets and bombs headed your way, and counter with 2.7 billion bullets and bombs of your own. Needless to say, Giga Wing is hard. In many ways, it’s almost too hard, and ends up being plain impossible at times. Ever so often, you will go up against a barrage of bullets that inevitably will kill you, no matter how hard you try to dodge them. There’s just so many enemies and so many projectiles flying at you, that you tend to miss some and die more often than you’d like. You really need eyes in the back of your head, next to your ears, on your chest, on your forehead, and on your rear end to actually see everything that’s coming as well as firing at your enemies. Even on the easiest setting, this game will own you and eventually make you its slave cleaning bunions out of its toes. With your tongue.
This is why the Force Bomb is so important, as it levels the playing field (though it shouldn’t really be necessary) and makes it fair. Basically, the Force Bomb is a screen-clearing weapon that kills everything in front of you, or at least damages it, letting you breathe and reset the strategy while preparing to die again (and again). You can adjust the amount of FB’s you get with each life – if you die you reset your bombs, meaning sometimes you might just want to fire your bombs, dash around doing what you can, and then dying to repeat the process, as tiring as it becomes. It’s not that the game is frustrating – it’s just annoying to die stupidly because the odds are so tipped against you. It’s like a 5-year-old tee-ball player facing Pedro Martinez and his 95 MPH+ fastball; all it’s going to do is make you cry to mommy after getting anally violated by the game constantly. The only good thing is the 2-player does divert attention, letting you and your teammate survive slightly longer than a single player would.
I suppose its possible to beat the game on a couple credits (or get to the last level on one credit to unlock the “good” ending – and if the good ending is not hardcore Japanese tentacle porn videos, it’s not good enough given how farkin’ hard the game is). But why bother? It seems Capcom knew that even the hardest of the hardcore shump’ers won’t stand a chance in Giga Wing, thus they took all the skill out of it (despite the last 2 paragraphs explaining that the game is harder to please than your mother-in-law) and gave the game unlimited continues. Suddenly, the game becomes worthless despite the challenge – all it will do is let you set the difficulty to 8, die over and over, yet still beat the game and see the endings, and brag that you beat Giga Wing on the hardest setting in a half-hour. As if. Beating Mars Matrix or Ikargua (before unlocking unlimited continues, anyhow) or Border Down on the hardest level is good enough to brag about – beating Giga Wing on any difficulty level will result in hearty laughter. Even your cat could beat this one, by hitting A over and over and knowing when to press start to continue. And no, you cannot turn off unlimited continues, you’re stuck with them no matter how fast you can clear on as few credits as possible.
That’s probably the worst thing about Giga Wing – it perhaps balances the nigh-impossible game itself by letting even novices beat it within 30 minutes, and the hardcore shump fans can just “create” challenges such as beating it, dying as little as possible. But as hard as Giga Wing is, as intense as the game is, as fun as the game can be despite it all, it’s partially FUBAR’d by making it impossible to not beat on your very first sitting. I could see unlocking continues as you play more hours (as Ikargua and Border Down do), but not automatically giving you an endless supply of lives. This is not the arcade, this is the home version, and the unlimited lives thing doesn’t work on a console, while it’s okay to have it in the arcade version since all that does is make you wanna pop quarters into the cabinet and shoot until your wrist detaches itself from your arm and heads for ER. Beating it with every character increases the replay as well as the always-fun multiplayer exploits, but this is not a shump you can play over and over unlike so many of the great DC shooters.
The only thing I can tell you about the graphics is they’re fast, and there’s no slowdown despite the millions of ships and millions of bullets flying. The thing is, shooters tend to not lend themselves well to those interested in a pretty game, since so much is going on (as in, trying to not die in a blaze of glory every 4 seconds) you don’t have time to notice. Perhaps that’s why shooters have gone the way of the dodo these days – no time to look at the pretty graphics. However, GW’s sprite-based engine is great despite being on the aged CPS32 arcade board. There’s just so much going on at one time that it’s a spectacle to behold if you check out the demo that runs when you leave the game on. Giga Wing 2 added polygons and all the cool new graphical effects, but that doesn’t hurt the prequel which manages to not only remind many of the old 1942/43 games, but all those crazy 8 and 16 bit shooters from the golden era of gaming. Just don’t expect to spend a lot of time gazing, as there’s simply too many other things to worry about.
There’s also the matter of Giga Wing in the audio department. The music is pretty standard fare, not comparing to the more epic soundtracks of other shooters. In fact, it’s really just drowned out by the endless shooting and blasting effects that roar throughout the game. They might as well not have music in the game at all, since all there is are those explosions and sounds of bullets flying everywhere. And again, since all the concentration needs to be on the game itself (unless you enjoy hitting start every 3 seconds to continue for the 1,000th time), you might not even notice the sounds amidst all the action. This is the mark of an old-school game; one that doesn’t give you the time to even bother looking at the visual and audio performance of a game.
The Bottom Line
In many ways, despite the challenge of Giga Wing, it might be an ideal starting game for someone new to shumps. It’s tough, yes, but the forgiving ability to continue endlessly might help a newbie learn the ropes slowly, like training wheels to the harder shooters on the Dreamcast. Shooter vets will also probably at least dig the challenge a bit despite the impossibility of beating it on one life/credit, making it a decent pick for shooter fans. Anyone else will definitely hate it, so just pass on Giga Wing. It could be a lot worse, really, and as is Giga Wing is a tough, essentially unfairly tough shooter that compensates with an ease of completion, making this a bargain bin purchase and little else, even if you’re in the above mentioned camps. Otherwise, you’re better off with Mars Matrix, Gunbird 2, Ikaruga, or Border Down for some classic and a challenge that’s more fair than cheap.
Fans of shooters are in for the ultimate test of reflex and skill with Capcom's release of its arcade shooter Giga Wing for Dreamcast. The top-down gr...More at eBay
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