1943 Kai

"Soldiers, keep on shooting!"

KAIZEN, a japanese word that means selling always the same game to the same people.
It's not a secret that CAPCOM before leaving a concept usually releases tons of clones improving minor aspects or introducing small features every time perfecting the game in the true spirit of marketing.
Of course this game don't makes the difference, and even if is not the most evident case of this modus operandi, curiously, they decided to emphasize it directly on the title!
I've played this game in the early '90 and it was funny! Then I found it in an old arcade few weeks ago, I had a nostalgia backfire, I've furiously played for almost two hours and to better recognize pros and cons I've tried it's official sequel 1941 Counterattack. It was still funny!

GAMEPLAY 8
To be honest the basis they started from was already quite good, 1943 was enjoyable mostly because the good difficulty calibration, and this one don't excepts.
Talking about the game itself, here it is an old school vertical shooter, with hordes of enemies approaching you acrobatically, the usual bosses and all the simple fun this disused genre gifted us for a decade.
You take control of an anonymous red (yellow if player two) biplane instead of the glorious P38 Lightning and you take off from a bombed carrier (gosh!), the power-up system is exactly the same of 1943 (really?), in the bottom-left you have a fuel-energy indicator that slowly decrease and a counter that tells you how long you can keep firing your special weapon, nothing special, you have to refill the tank with the POW or tank icons and pick up the weaponry avoiding finding yourself using a peashooter!
Between the half dozen weapons available my own favorite one is the donutshooter (aka shotgun) that neutralizes opposing fire and leaves you free to maneuver against surrounding enemies.
As a plus you can launch smart bombs or perform evasive loops up to four times per stage.
Despite the quite slow scrolling, compared to 1941 is stuck, and the dozens of stages always similar the game don't let you get bored.
Unfortunely this game shows a lack of action variety straight from is ancestor 1942, you hit both air and ground targets with the same weapon, no different planes to choose from, no shortcuts or different ways, no tricks like reflect force etc., and at the end of each stage the well known boss (massive ship or bomber) or a wing of bombers to shoot down, nothing new under the sun indeed!
For today's players the gameplay is the most basic ever seen, and in fact it was basic for it's era too.

GRAPHICS 9
Nothing special for today's standard but I've always loved the way people at CAPCOM designed sprites and backgrounds, everything is rendered in a oil paint-like style, with an utmost care for the particulars.
The sprites even not very large are crisp and clean with a decent palette.
Especially your airplane has several animation frames, not tons but more than usual, same thing for the explosions, enough various and well done.
The backgrounds aren't very various, always the sea and the clouds in different day moments, sometimes a ship, sometimes an island, sometimes a ship sailing on an island...
There's no presentation at all but in between the stages you can see two (I said two!) different background pictures on the same animated scene portraiting your small biplane making a loop of happiness after defeating the boss!
On the technical side there's nothing to say, sometimes the screen is saturated by enemies and bullets but the scrolling never slow down and the flickering is minimum.

SOUND 6
Nothing special, but in the eighties did is job honestly.
Even if not various, is a good mix of martial themes and jingles remixed in the 8 bit sound chip style, during the fight it sets the proper mood and the ''beat'' pumps alright without disturbing.
Same thing for the effects, everything works fine, but you won't go crazy for it.

STORY N.Q.
All you have to know is you are piloting a single american biplane and you have to destroy the whole Rising Sun Navy. Nothing more nothing less.
Please notice CAPCOM is japanese, maybe is something like an Hara-Kiri, bah!

CHALLENGE AND REPLAY VALUE 7
This game is hard both in single and double, and is also very long!
Now I don't remember precisely but I think I've employed about one hour to reach the last boss: ''Imperial Cruiser Yamato'' and I failed sinking it overpowered by it's forest of anti-aircraft turrets!
And to survive till that point I had to feed that cursed coin-op with more than Five Euros, Damn!
As you know ten years ago the Hi-score challenge was a must (at least in Europe) with best performances published on videogame's magazines! This prevented you to get bored too early, but now it seems something has changed, for today's players such a simple title can keep up the interest only for a very short period. Sadness.

BOTTOM LINE
Retrogaming is something you do more with heart than brain and fingers, and nowadays this game is a symbol of the dear-dead-days, but if I have to judge with the eyes of a newcomer, God, it's poor!
Anyway this game is very rare now, if you never tried it before and you have a chance go for it, you won't be disappointed!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/28/02, Updated 12/28/02