Toaplan as a company has a reputation of high quality side scrolling shooters that were released from late 80s to early 90s and in 2023 some of these titles were given a re-release.
The first volume contains four games and all share something in common, spray and pray your firearms and try to avoid getting hit.
The games from volume 1 include the following:
Twin Cobra (1987),
Truxton (1988),
Zero Wing (1989) and
Out Zone (1990)
Twin Cobra and Truxton are both vertical scrolling shooters, Zero Wing is a horizontal scrolling shooter and Out Zone is a top-down shooter, with the last not having automatic scrolling like the other three, it does encourage the player to keep on moving forward due to a draining energy meter that can kill the player when that energy bar reaches 0.
Now a fair amount of re-releases would just make a minimalistic effort by producing their own emulator to run the Toaplan roms and call it a day, but Bitwave Games decided to push it further.
For starters, it has a lot of visual options, including:
Frame size, scanlines, borders such as channel viz/music viz, tutorial and in-game stats.
There is also an extra bonus for two of the four games from volume one, a new widescreen option for both Twin Cobra and Truxton. With this option enabled, the player has more space to move around, but the enemies will appear instantly on-screen from the left/right side of the gameplay field rather than slowly appearing in-game by leaving the black border when using the standard aspect ratio method.
The third game: Zero Wing is a game that needs no introduction thanks to the infamous Engrish line "All your base are belong to us" that was first introduced in the Sega Mega Drive release to both Japan and Europe.
That's right, this meme cutscene doesn't appear in the arcade version and currently some users online were gutted to not see this in the original arcade version when the 2023 version was first released.
But, the team Bitwave Games has updated the game as of March 2nd 2023 and added this remastered intro with better English translation ... other than that one line due to its old school meme legacy, I still prefer the Mega Drive version due to having a better music track as the tone of the melody changes the moment after the antagonist CATS leaves the conversation, still better than nothing.
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| All your memes are belong to me!! |
One of the most notable changes when playing Zero Wing is the removal of the distracting red flash that occurs after destroying enemies, an adjustment I have no complaints about, giving it a notable advantage than say the Toaplan core on MiSTER FPGA for now.
So Twin Cobra, Truxton as base games have the optional widescreen support and Zero Wing "Arcade" version has a remastered meme intro based on the Sega Mega Drive release and the removal of the red flash after destroying enemies. What about Out Zone? After a quick look, there doesn't seem to be anything noteworthy.
That's all the unique tweaks I've noticed so far. Now onto the general tweaks.
All four games from volume 1 have a very fast boot-up when launching the game via Steam that it makes you think it was a "quick boot rom from commercial emulator" but hitting the menu button brings up its own options in a flash without any animation delays, I already mentioned visual options earlier but there's a ton of gameplay options too.
New toggles for a very easy/less stressful playthrough can be done by reducing your character's vulnerability hitbox, giving it up to 2 extra HP before dying, rapid fire up to 30 presses per second, auto dodging where the character will automatically dodge most harmful objects by moving very slightly though it's not very useful in tight spaces, lite-bullet hell moments and non-projectile elements such as enemies.
Practising for a high score, 1CC, speedrun is very accessible, as the player can:
Create save states and then load them,
able to rewind gameplay up to 10-16 minutes which I tend to use if I just lost a life.
There is even a dedicated practice mode where you can select any level, spawn at any checkpoint with a selectable current weapon of your choice, weapon's power level and even a cycle counter which tracks how many times the player has cleared the game. While it doesn't sound like much, having the option to practice in nearly every segment in the game without resorting to save-state packs that were downloaded from the internet is a huge boon.
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| Assist toggles to make the playthroughs less stressful. |
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| Practice menu to master every segment in the game. |
The input latency is very good, while I don't have the tools to measure an accurate reading, it felt very instantaneous. This was tested on a PS5 controller wired, so your mileage may vary on the controller used to play this game.
That said, there are some possible improvements I would like to see in future patches.
1) Have visual arrows and buttons on highlighted menu options. Right now when you highlight them, you will have to read a text from the lower half of the screen to know what you can do to change its settings, but by having two arrows and a pushing button icon, should make it a lot clearer. It took me a while to figure out how to disable scanline/bloom effects in one of the games, but by using the D-Pad I was able to change it to a clean pixelated look as seen on emulators.
2) Background frame bugs, when both screen backdrop and overlay are turned off, changing the overlay to tutorial and then to a different option will automatically set the screen backdrop to option 2 despite being currently set at 0. I have to go to screen background and hit right to re-select option 0 for a pure black screen background. This bug doesn't happen when the game has been booted up with all background options set to off, it's only when backdrop has selected to 2 at least once for the bug to occur.
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| Backdrop bugs, background stars still showing despite being set to "off". |
3) Stat text colours. This issue occurs in some games where important data such as "Red" "Green" and "Blue" used the incorrect font colour on display. I don't think it occurs in Twin Cobra.
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| Red = Grey, Green = Red, Blue = Brown ????? |
4) On the current version, starting up a game by using the practice menu disables in-game sound effects and only has the music playing, the only way to restore this is to complete a stage, dying doesn't work because you only have 1 life and no continues which takes the player back to the title screen.
5) Hitbox viewer doesn't make 100% sense at times. For example, at the end of the first stage in Out Zone has four robots, yet the third robot has no visual yellow hitbox. Despite this, walking up to that enemy can still kill you.
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| The third one looks suspicious. |
Overall this is a great way to play these side scrolling shooters, accessible options for the newer players, dedicated practice tools for the purists to master every checkpoint with nearly any option available just to make their future 1CC runs a reality. It's not perfect as I mentioned some issues did occur when ing the games.
That said, the filesize for each game is extremely tiny in 2023 standards, which is great for the customer as they can play these classic games as soon as possible, but for certain players hoping to have unlockable content as seen in many other retro collections will be disappointed with this one as there is only sound test option unlocked by default. Simply put, adding unlockable gallery images would have made the filesize bigger.
Cunning ToaplanReview codes provided by Bitwave Games
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