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It’s a
pain just to write this. I don’t mean that figuratively, either: After playing Side Arms:
Hyper Dyne, I needed a wrist brace and a couple ibuprofen. This thing is brutal on a scale
that our twenty-teens consciousness can barely compute. On top of the injury, I became dizzy
after playing for only twenty minutes. Auto-fire? Nope, you need to hit that button every time
you want a bullet on the screen. And it doesn’t help that your basic armament has about the
stopping power of a warm pool noodle. Scratch that. Half of a warm pool noodle. The year
is 1986, the evil masterminds behind all of this are Capcom, and I’m about to forward
them a bill.
Side Arms is a fairly standard side-scrolling SHMUP, featuring one or two dudes in massive
space-piloting armor with guns. Lots of guns. There’s your stand pool-noodle-shooter and
five special weapons that have to be found in the wild before they’re added to your
arsenal. There’s a railgun, a spread gun, a three-way gun... and yes, that display down
at the bottom of the screen there DOES look a hell of a lot like Gradius. The mechanics
are a little different, though; you can collect the guns in any order, and switch between
them at any time. And should you die - and you ARE going to die, repeatedly and ingloriously
- you only lose whichever gun you were holding at the time. Which is refreshing, until you
die three times in short succession and lose your entire arsenal, and then have to take
down a boss with the aforementioned pool noodle cannon.
As strange as this sounds, Side Arms suffers from the same kind of sprite bloat that plagued
another Capcom title, Mega Man & Bass. Everything’s just so... big. That screen gets exceptionally
crowded, especially when the enemies start firing off homing missiles like it’s the
4th of Martian July. It certainly doesn’t help that, as a flying spacefaring robot armor
thingamabob of immense size, your hitbox is freakin’ huge. Combined with a painfully
short grace period after getting blown to pieces, and you quickly learn the true blood-vessel-bursting
capacity of this monstrosity. Good games are tough. Great games are brutal but fair. This...
this is on Normal difficulty, and it’s still having its way with me. The only safety you
can find is by grabbing the glowy orbs with Greek letters on ‘em, which allow you to
merge with a secondary craft that enters from offscreen and gives you an eight-way explosion
attack at intervals in addition to the standard weaponry. Which kinda makes it look like your
robot-shooty-craft is having a seizure. Likely the result of the intro video, which seems
like the inspiration for that infamous Electric Soldier Porygon episode. And you’re supposed
to input your initials WHILE this is happening. How Capcom managed to reprint this - on Capcom
Classics Collections Vol.2 (for PS2) and Remixed (for PSP), as well as for the TurboGrafx-16
and various PC platforms - without a pile of lawsuits is completely beyond me. Now I’m
going to grab an icepack.