Zero Wing

"Hey look, a review without a translation reference"

Yes, I, like all of you, heard about this game through the once-quiet internet-in-joke-turned-annoying-joke-told-too-often. Yes, the translation is horrible, but that's just a loveable quirk to this otherwise-perfectly fine game.

Graphics - 8
Impressive, for Genesis. Not so much for the modern wonders of our time with our complacent gamecubes and much-too-hyped PS2s, our underrated Dreamcasts and our unfairly-hated X-boxes, with their killer graphics. This one is reasonably textured. It's 1989. What do you want?

Sound - 5
Not the annoying sound of so many scrolling shooters, but a nice background music that doesn't make much of the nigh-constant firing of weapons. No powerful, emotional symphony-orchestra songs full of rumbling crescendos, but it gets the job done. I happen to like the little buzzy-type .midi songs that play in the background, truth be told.

Control - 8
No complaints here. Up and down move your little 'zig' for great justice and the other buttons do their jobs. It's really hard to mess up controls in a game such as this, and I can say with full certainty that they didn't.

Gameplay - 6
Great game. Sorta like all the others of the same genre, of course, and there's not really very much new. Except that you can take hold of some ships and hurl them into others. That's reasonably cool and new. Otherwise, the game holds true to the precepts set for an acceptable side-scrolling shooting-dealie set years before, keeping everything you love and losing nothing. Just consider it an 'expansion' or a 'sequel' to R-Type. People are always willing to buy expansions and sequels for reasons I can't really comprehend.

Fun Factor - 8
Not so much that's new, but nothing old lost. Like I said, it's like playing another game of whatever series you prefer, only with dancing raisins at the end. Yes, I ruined the ending for the first difficulty. But man, it doesn't even have anything to do with the storyline. They're just dancing raisins. The music isn't even remotely impressive.

Replayability - 7
You'll want to play it again, because the ending you get after beating it once is just plain stupid. I'd use the phrase ''amazingly craptacular,'' but I'm fairly sure that it's not allowed in these reviews. But it's really quite difficult to beat it that first time, and many may not have the time or patience to play it all three times.

Buy or Rent
Good luck doing either. Definitely worth a buy (or download for you dirty, dirty, pirates out there), if you can find it (probably at a huge discount), as a sort of ''when you've got nothing better to do and want to play an extremely repetitive game'' sort of like tetris.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/13/02, Updated 01/13/02