God Panic

~ GOD PANIC ~

Teichiku

Super CD-ROM

1992

I guess this resides with Star Parodier in the PC Engine's niche of wacky/cartoony verticals, and the one you prefer might just come down to the kind of humor and color you enjoy in your "lighthearted" shooter. SP cleverly caricatures Soldier-series enemies while GP has a huge weird-looking red guy with explosive farts. SP has bright, gorgeous snowfield and undersea levels while GP has you soaring over an enormous bikini-clad sun bather.

Seriously though, GP does succeed with its nutty character designs. The fourth stage alone features the aforementioned crimson fart giant; pudgy pouncing guys whom you can knock to the turf; a mohawk-sporting, chain-wielding punk-rocker dude and his two oddball sidekicks; clones of your own character; a lunatic tanuki; and a fire-breathing dragon.

That's a solid boss parade, but even the normal enemy sprites are often large and appropriately off-the-wall in design.

The soundtrack is pretty cool and presents rips of some famous rock numbers (like "Danger Zone"). SP still whips this game superficially, as the background graphics here are far from impressive, but GP holds up well enough with its aesthetics.

The gameplay is where most of my concerns lie. The action is heavy on bullets and other projectiles although your hit box is a little large for this style of play. In fact, even the bullets themselves are relatively big. (The developers seemed to have an idea that this would be a sloppy affair, as they granted players an extendable life bar and allowed play to resume right from the spot of death even after the use of a continue.) GP is still easy, though: it seems to suffer from the Cyber Core syndrome in that it keeps you busy with lots of things to blast and hurls lots of crap at you but somehow still ends up lacking challenge. The weapons are lame for a shooter of this ilk, and the adventure is too short, with only five proper stages to play through. (If you're wondering what I mean by "proper," well, let's just say that there's a GNG-ish twist that a lot of people will not be amused by.)

Once you do reach the end (which will probably happen sooner rather than later), there's little incentive to take another trip through GP. You can set it to Hard to try to draw a little more life out of it, but then you end up with sped-up bullets coming at your huge hit box, which just makes the whole thing feel messy. If you stick with the default difficulty level to maintain a playable feel, you'll find it's just too easy to stay one step ahead of the game, regardless of the constant fire coming at you; and you'll discover that GP is a classic case of a game with a lot of good ideas that weren't executed particularly well. Take the last boss, for instance.

He's a gigantic vampire/monarch/pro-wrestling-champion bear dude, definitely neat in design. And he has five or six types of attacks at his disposal, which is also cool. Unfortunately, instead of utilizing his attack types randomly to keep you on your toes, he continues to use the same one over and over until you deal a certain amount of damage to him, provoking him to switch to another. This should've been a great battle, but instead, it's plain old easy, just like the fights that precede it.

GP certainly had the potential to be one of the PCE's true sleepers. It's still a decent enough shooter, with charismatic enemies, quality tunes, and consistent action. Honestly, though, based on screens I'd seen and reviews I'd read prior to purchasing it, along with the first few fun-filled moments I'd spent with it, I thought it'd be a little better than it actually is. I ended up disappointed, but I have little doubt that there's an audience out there for it. Nonetheless, if it comes down to buying this or Star Parodier for $5-10 more, SP is the smart selection, no contest.