Welcome to World Zero - Reviews for the hardcore gamer

All kids have their ups and downs but on the whole I feel as if I had a pretty good childhood. There were the schoolyard bullies, the lice shampoos, and that awful closet in the attic, but I’ve never felt I was deprived until my copy of Gunstar Heroes arrived in the mail about six months ago. Missing out on an entire decade of the best run and gun this side of Metal Slug 3 is tantamount to blasphemy for the self-diagnosed hardcore gamer. If you are acquainted with Treasure’s first effort you know just how deep the well of awesomeness Treasure was drawing from with this title goes. If you are not, the best analogy I could draw would be to Konami’s Contra III (which Treasure themselves had a hand in developing) --minus the inhibitions. Whereas Contra can sometimes bog the player down with its demanding and precise nature, Gunstar encourages complete abandon. Doing away with the one hit kills and implementing an immensely rewarding melee attack system, the game begs you to dive right into the thick of things. You’ll spray the air with gunfire, belly flop on top of an enemy battalion, catch a hostile grenade and return it from whence it came; all the while hurtling over enemy attacks, racing through mineshafts, and defending small villages from the threat of imperial conquest. All this within the span of about fifteen minutes.

Trying to boil Gunstar down into something capable of concrete analysis and critique does the game a great disservice. Yes, there are scaling, multi segmented bosses around every turn. The soundtrack resounds with some of the most memorable tunes of the entire 16 bit generation and the Genesis does things that it should not be able to do on such a consistent basis that any future analysis of the system’s limited capabilities becomes moot at best. But none of this is what Gunstar is about. At its heart, Gunstar was a game about making things explode and having a damn good time of doing it. And if the sequel were to succeed in nothing else, it at the very least adheres to this ethic.

Maegawa, CEO of Treasure, has been quoted as saying that the intent behind Gunstar Super Heroes was not to make a followup sequel so much as it was to make a game that surpassed the original in all facets. This pseudo remake strives to have bigger bosses, more dazzling effects, a quicker pace, more outrageous character design, etc. However in a somewhat contrasting manner GSH cuts back on the number of options available to the player, a thing that was once so important to the original Gunstar Heroes. One thing distinct to the original Gunstar was the vast amount of weaponry available for use. In a manner similar to the aforementioned Contra III, the player is capable of juggling between two weapons simultaneously. Treasure upped the ante by allowing you to combine your chosen guns into a specialized super weapon of sorts. The amount of ways to dispatch of your foes remains unmatched in the genre to this day. Gunstar Super Heroes, on the other hand, forgoes this open-ended approach in favor of a much smaller and subsequently more specialized repertoire. Every situation in the original Gunstar Heroes had to be conquerable by any one of the game’s many available weapons. Theoretically, the limited arsenal in GSH allows for a more detailed and demanding approach in terms of enemy/level design because Treasure can be assured that whatever means necessary to conquer a situation are readily available at all times. In practice, this amounts to switching to your homing laser from your standard machine gun during some of the games pseudo 3d sequences. It’s a decent, albeit underutilized idea and one that I applaud. The fact is however that the game is still entirely conquerable with any one weapon and therefore the idea doesn’t work as it was intended.

The other big change that this remake undergoes is in the theory of its level design. It wasn’t uncommon in the original Gunstar Heroes to come across long segments of flat terrain, the only obstacles being the enemies therein. Though entirely flat, drawn-out stages do not sound very inspired, they had a very logical purpose as acting as a virtual playground of sorts for which you to do battle in. The original Gunstar Heroes featured platforms overhead and boxes with which to break and take cover behind, not because they were necessarily challenges you had to overcome, but because Treasure knew they were things which you could have fun with in the midst of battle. Gunstar Super Heroes is suspiciously devoid of any such areas. The new melee abilities that you are given just scream out for an opportunity to really be put to use and such an opportunity never really arises during the run and gun segments of play. What was once the meat of Gunstar’s gameplay has since been relegated to a kind of warm up before boss encounters. Granted, there is still enough fodder for you to shoryuken to your hearts content, but the overwhelming focus of Gunstar Super Heroes seems to be the remade boss encounters from the original. And since there is a decided lack of completely original content to replace what was nixed from the Genesis original, Gunstar Super Heroes feels a lot shorter and smaller of scope as a result.

While Gunstar Super Hero’s truncated length may be chalked up to a deliberate design decision on the part of Treasure and does a great deal for the games replayability, there are other issues with GSH, all of which point to this being a rushed product. Boss AI is entirely hit or miss and there doesn’t seem to be much of a logical progression in terms of difficulty throughout the game’s levels, with some of the mid-level bosses being much harder than those at the end. Furthermore, there are some serious oversights with regards to a few boss attack patterns which allow you an easy victory and insure you’re not being hit throughout the battle. Sure, you don’t have to exploit these oversights if you don’t want to, but the fact that they’re there bothers me. Gunstar Super Heroes was a game twelve years in coming and it’s still rushed. What gives?

Aside from the exceptionally awful helicopter mini-game in Orange’s stage --a piss poor scrolling shooter from the same hands that crafted Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga-- (Treasure, hang your heads in shame) the game remains fun to play. And given all the aforementioned flaws, almost inexplicably so. Since the obscure twelve year old Genesis game that precedes this title probably isn’t a useful frame of reference for most of you reading this article, if you’ve never played the original Gunstar then run out and buy GSH immediately. It’s the best run and gun on the Gameboy Advance by far. But if you’ve grown up with the Treasure’s classic, realize that this is a very different and slightly less enjoyable beast. But even after all of my nitpicking I have to confess that I played through GSH no less than two dozen times during the week of its release. And perhaps that speaks volumes about this game when I’d rather be playing Treasure’s proverbial ‘bad day’ than the majority of new releases out there.

Rating	The rating scale in detail
9.5	++ Easily the best looking game for the GBA thus far. + Impressive boss characters.
7.0	+ Features a decent dose of nostalgic tunes. - Nothing really stands out as being too memorable.
8.0	+ Solid run and gun gameplay. - Control scheme is difficult to adapt to and is needlessly complicated. – Awful shooting minigames in two of the game's levels. ++ The remade fight with Seven Force justifies this remake all by itself.
8.5	+ It’s interesting to see a modern twist on classic concepts.
8.0	+ Three difficulty levels. + Two playable (though largely similar) characters. + Stage select and time trial options. ++ The short length and stage select makes GSH entirely playable in short bursts.
8.2	+/- Taken alone, GSH is a damn fine shoot 'em up. But Treasure has a tendency to create games that, like Gunstar Heroes, are not only the best of their genre, but are the best by such a staggeringly huge margin that anything even resembling mediocrity kind of stings a bit.