There’s an arcade in Akiba called ‘HEY’, or Hirose Entertainment Yard. This place focuses on older games, and is known for having a floor mostly dedicated to shoot-em-ups from yesteryear. Over the many days of this trip, I made it my mission to play every shooter unfamiliar to me.
The games are all lined up as you can see above, in about five rows. There’s dozens and dozens of them, but I didn’t play any games I’m familiar with (more on this below). This post therefore features a lot of games you’ve probably never played or even heard of before, most likely because they never left Japan (and I speculate perhaps never even left Tokyo)! I’ll rate each game out of 10, which will be an indication of how much I wanted to play it again after a single try (a 5 would be a 50% chance).
Each game incidentally costs ¥100 per play, and (I assume) is set to a high difficulty level. The cabinets are kept in meticulous condition, and the joysticks and buttons all work, and many games also have added dedicated autofire buttons.
Ultra X Weapons (1995): A fantastic Ultraman themed game in which you control one of six Ultras and face off against enemies from the various shows. Great controls and music, an autobomb, but a very steep difficulty rise a few levels in. Obviously of particular interest to me, this one may be a little mundane for non-Ultra fans. (9)
Rapid Hero (1994): Very fast gameplay with good power ups but somewhat bland graphics and simplistic bosses. Seems simplistic for a mid 1990s release. Only average. (5)
GunNail (1992): Very reminiscent of Truxton, which is a good thing. It had bonkers weapons, waves of enemies to use them on and some sort of score combo system. This was a wild ride and I’ll play it again before I leave! (8)
Thunder Dragon (1991): A helicopter shooter reminiscent of Flying Tiger that shows its age with stingy power ups and graphics that seem dated for 1991. Recovery after death is Gradius-level challenging. (5)
Thunder Dragon 2 (1993): An upgrade from the predecessor with smoother play, more bombastic weapons and slightly less difficulty. I like how the player speaks when he kills enemies (“Get out of my sight”), but it’s still an unremarkable game. (6)
Super Spacefortress Macross (1992): The graphics are great, and the bosses fun to fight. I like the novel power up system, but it was unfun sometimes being forced to change your ship when I didn’t want to. A solid early 90s shooter, possibly playing it a bit safe due to the license. (7)
X-Multiply (1989): Irem ripped off their own smash hit R-Type with this one. Everything from the graphics to level design to the controls and even music is derivative and is a veneer to try and hide the fact that the gameplay is just boring. Skip this one. (4)
Salamander 2 (1996): I was happy to play this since I’d never had the chance, but despite detailed graphics the game suffers from extreme difficulty and overall boring level design. If you’re going to make a sequel to a beloved game, it has to at least bring something new! (5)
Batsugan (1993): An influential and now-legendary game that incorporates intense shooting with an RPG-lite XP system. It’s got great power levels, clever bosses, beautiful graphic effects and pigs! Batsugan also dances on the edge of bullet-hell territory, and was the last game released by the wizards at Toaplan before they went under. I loved it so much I immediately went to a nearby store and bought the just-released Switch port. (9)
Battle Garegga (1996): Another famous game, featuring beautiful graphics, great power ups and intense action. The version in HEY seems to be the initial release where the enemy shots are incredibly difficult to see so the difficulty is insane, but it’s enormously fun to play regardless. A deserved classic! (8)
Battle Bakraid (1999): A sort of followup to Garegga, this features similar design and gameplay, with even more insane power levels (half a dozen options can surround the ship), a combo system and an absolute avalanche of pickups. It’s also bullet-helly, which isn’t surprising since the designer went to Cave after making this game. A first class shooter. (9)
Armored Police Batrider (1998): Another ‘Garegga-like’ from the same developer (Raizing), with insane weapons, an xp system, perfect controls, great scaling graphics and an unusual team system where each of your three lives is a different ship. Hectic and great fun. (8)
Kingdom Grand Prix (1994): A fantasy-based game which seems to merge racing and shooter elements. A bit befuddling, but the graphics and astonishing, I loved the fantasy elements, and the shooting is solid. (7)
Dimahoo (2000): A late sequel to the above, this sheds the racing part for a full-on fantasy based shooter. This game is amazing – one of the best I played at HEY. The pixel-art graphics are extraordinarily detailed, featuring things like giant turtles with castles on their backs, flying demons and fairies holding spellbooks. The power-up/xp system is rewarding and the bosses are fantastic. As a late-era shooter, it’s bullet-hellish as well. A work of art. (9)
Andro Dunas (1992): Reminiscent of Section Z or even Scramble, this simplistic game feels like an early concept that needed a few more months in the oven. While the graphics and level designs are forgettable, I liked the power up system where four different weapons gain levels with pickups and only decrease by one level upon death. (5)
Operation Ragnarok (1994): Cross P-47 with Salamander and you’ll get this. Overly large sprites and weird morph animations result in a muddy look that doesn’t work. The gameplay is generic and suffers from slowdown (this is a Neo-Geo arcade game), and while I give it points for attempted spectacle it ultimately fails. (5)
Pulstar (1995): This is a famous Neo-Geo shooter since it was a late release and uses pre-rendered visuals, mostly successfully. However the game is a blatant R-Type ripoff with, for me, the same weaknesses. This means for all the flashy visuals the game is too slow and memory based, and had a lot of cheap deaths. Pretty but boring. (6)
Blazing Star (1998): This is a sequel to Pulstar but for me seemed a downgrade. Too much slowdown, weird power up/scoring systems and muddy graphics made the game a bit of a slog to play. Half-baked. (5)
Dangun Feveron (1998): Crazy disco (yes, disco) based game where you annihilate massive waves of fodder enemies and collect little guys trapped in (disco?) balls for points. It’s absolutely a shooter with crazy weaponry, a hell of bullets to avoid, and a complex scoring system based on pickups and enemies killed, but all of this, at least for my one attempt, faded into the background due to the disco presentation. Mostly I think it works, and the fact it’s a Cave game is probably a big part of that! (7)
FixEight (1992): A graphically ugly Commando-esque game where you manually scroll the screen and can only fire in three directions. Dated even when it was released. (3)
Varia Metal (1995): An unambiguous game that feels more like an Amiga shooter than something for the arcade. The graphics and sound are extremely dull. While it is novel you can morph your ship, there’s hardly any fun here. (2)
Master of Weapon (1989): A Xevious clone released years later and not a patch on its inspiration. The enemies and powerups are boring and the graphics are terrible so you just don’t care what comes next. It’s also punishingly difficult. (3)
Gridseeker (1992): This was the most difficult game I played: even the ‘popcorn’ (ie. one-shot fodder) enemies require multiple shots! The ship has a massive weapon in front of it (like the R-Type force) which blocks some but not all enemy shots and leads to hit box confusion. It’s too early for bullet hell, but the enemy bullets move at light speed. Strictly a ‘one go’ title! (2)
Gun Frontier (1990): An unusual game in which your and the enemy ships resemble flying revolvers (from the Wild West era). You collect bullets and coins to power up, and deaths are merciful. Overall it’s interesting due to the visual style and was fun to play, despite being a bit simple. Worth a closer look. (7)
Terra Diver (1996): A vertical shooter that uses a horizontal display is bold idea from the start (and possibly chosen to make it easily portable to home consoles) and while it has worked with other games I don’t feel it does here since the ship moves slow enough it’s frustrating moving across the wide screen. The poor graphics and weird weapons systems compound the problems I had with the game. It didn’t grab me at all. (3)
Final Star Force (1992): This is nothing like Star Force so I suppose the choice of name was marketing. The primary takeaway was the absolutely game-killing slowdown (affects you and enemies differently) and the fact it’s relentlessly difficult and almost impossible to recover from after your first death. I somewhat liked the graphics, although the colour cycling is repulsive. Overall poor. (5)
Zaviga (1984): Imagine a cross between Xevious and Zaxxon with horrible graphics, random terrain and sprites and insanely slow ship control. This was the oldest and worst shooter in HEY; and it almost felt unfinished! (1)
Varth (1992): Fantastically stylish pixel graphics where the enemies and backgrounds match perfectly. Great control and weapon options, and fun bosses. No particular outstanding feature but everything just works very well. A fantastically fun game. (9)
NebulasRay (1994): This game has a horrible screen ‘rolling’ effect (as if the playfield is mapped onto half a cylinder) that almost gave me motion sickness every time I moved the ship! The dull colorless graphics don’t help, and it’s also extremely fast and difficult. A relic of its time that hasn’t aged well at all. (1)
And there you have it. Playing these games took many hours, and I’ve been to HEY every day this trip (usually in the evenings). Amazingly the selection of games changed once or twice, and some of the games listed above are now replaced with different ones (Rapid Hero became Gun Frontier for example). I assume HEY rotates their arcade boards frequently, which makes the place even more important as a venue to keep these old arcade games alive.
While I’ve reviewed a lengthy list of games here, HEY actually has many more shooters available. The games I didn’t play for this post (because I’m familiar with them already) included most of the Gradius series, the 194X series, the Raiden series, the Raystorm series and the dozen or so Cave games.
There’s also two more floors of retro arcade bames! The floor above the shooters contains dozens of retro beat-em-ups and fighting games, as well as loads of retro games from other genres as well. On the bottom floor next to the newest Densha de Go cabinet they have two older ones as well. It really is an arcade game utopia.
Being able to do this was one of the goals of this trip, and another reason why I deliberately stayed in Akihabara. It’s been enormously entertaining (and relaxing) just burning away time happily playing old retro games in a dark arcade every evening for these last ten or so days 🙂
Lastly, the above photo shows the funniest thing I found in HEY. On the very top floor, in a ‘hidden’ corner behind some cabinets, is their only Ultraman card battle game. Guess where you’ll find me later this evening?
