SideArms

~ SIDEARMS ~

Radiance Software / Capcom

HuCard

1989

I'd owned SideArms for a while without ever really getting into it because it made a bad initial impression on me. When I finally bothered to play through it, I found it to be a good, tough, fast-paced shooter, much better than the disappointing (and fundamentally similar) Spriggan mark2. Most of the weapons are useful, the music is nice, and the enemies never let up.

However, there are a few things I don't like about it:

It's kind of ugly. The backdrop colors look washed out, and there isn't a single impressive enemy in the entire game. The graphical shortcomings don't bug me much anymore because I'm so focused on the action when I play, but they put me off back when I first tried the chip.

In keeping with the unimpressive enemies point, the bosses are pretty weak, and you're forced to face some of them repeatedly. This particular ship definitely wears out its welcome by the end and is a pushover once you figure out which gun to use against it.

This wheel thing, too, is guilty of making gratuitous repeat appearances, and you can usually crush it just by using a simple trick (notice where the mecha is positioned in the screen).

It's cool that you can stock different weapons, but having to pause the game to switch between them can be a real pain in the neck.

I usually don't advocate the usage of checkpoints, but this game should've been designed around them. As it is, once you die, you reappear with a terribly brief period of invulnerability, and your foes tend to swarm you, meaning it's easy to lose lots of lives in mere seconds. The fast, snake-like enemies are extremely dangerous because of this. The solution, of course, is to practice to the point where you simply don't die, but the learning process can be more arduous and discouraging than it really needed to be because of this multiple-quick-deaths issue.

The game maintains the long-standing TurboChip shooter tradition of HORRIBLE "endings."