Well, good to see that they corrected the spelling mistakes for the Mega Drive version.
Goodness, another correction! Maybe they'll make it a hattrick and correct the last se-
oh.
Well, I guess it's finally over now. Over an hour of playtime getting screenshots from the arcade game, and more than that for the Mega Drive port. I don't know what to say, really, but I'm glad it's over, because having to play through this about 10 times in the space of one weekend is a painful experience. Sure, it's a pretty short game, but it feels like we've come so far. Never mind, eh?
Might as well end this one the way we always do- It's HIGH SCORE TABLE TIME!
And so ends the rather insignificant story of Yanmer, or Kait, or whatever. Now, before I make my final judgement, there's something that needs to be dealt with. As I've made veiled references to within this article, there's something utterly mind-blowing about both versions of Insector X that I was waiting to talk about. What could it be? The answer is...
The game has a Rank system. A very silly one.
Those of you in the audience who aren't totally hardcore shmup freaks may wonder what the hell that even is. Well, shoot-em-ups sometimes use a Rank system, whereby the computer keeps tabs on how well you're doing- if you're blazing through the game, it'll step up accordingly and throw more enemies at you, increasing the difficulty until you die, when it resets to a sane level (although different games do things differently- some drop it when you bomb, for example). Good examples of this are some of the later Raizing shoot-em-ups like Battle Garegga, some Cave games like Ibara, and of course, Zanac, which is particularly infamous since picking up a specific weapon makes the game go into overdrive and the enemies come at you so fast, you'll probably die within seconds.
Insector X, amazingly enough, has a system like this, but it's a very lazy way of doing things. I discovered this almost entirely by accident, and if you don't have it pointed out to you, there's a chance you'll never know. In essence, the game jacks up the difficulty level based entirely on your weapon level. On the Normal difficulty level, upgrading your normal weapon beyond the third level (the double red shots) will have two effects on the game:
#1 - Small-fry enemies (bees, flies, etc.) will start to fire 'suicide bullets' at you when they die.
#2 - Bigger enemies (Middle Bosses, Bosses) will take more shots before dying.
This leads to the rather paradoxical situation where, in the Mega Drive version at least, the Round 1 boss can be killed quicker with the standard weapon than with a heavily upgraded one. Before I found this out, I played Insector X like any other shoot-em-up, and always hit a problem along the way, usually around the Plains level, when my weapon level was high enough to cause a problem. Now, though, I realise it's best to play it conservatively- grab two power-ups and a speed icon, a sub-weapon, then proceed to avoid every other power-up in the entire game.
The thing is, in Zanac, when you pick up that weapon that causes the computer to go into Kill Mode, it does so by speeding things up and making the enemies more numerous. While the suicide bullets are a neat little addition, the fact that bigger enemies take longer to kill with upgraded weapons just seems a bit silly, and when you realise how it works, takes you out the game a little, somehow- avoiding all the special items just doesn't feel natural (it's not like in Raiden where you avoid the items until they change to the colour you want, you have to straight-up not pick them up) so... It just feels wrong, you know?
To close (finally, thankfully, mercifully) I might as well you tell you which version to really go for, as I promised. The arcade game certainly looks nicer, but it's got some weird issues, mostly due to the higher cheapness factor, the rubbish sub-weapon system and the utterly pointless sections shoehorned in before bosses. The Mega Drive game is pretty ugly in comparison, and has some very difficult (but not too cheap) segments... But it does have at least one advantage, in that since it gets rid of some of the unnecessary bits, and makes the sub-weapon system much, much friendlier, it feels a lot tighter as a game. It's a little thing, really, but it goes towards making the game feel a little better as a result.
Really, Insector X is little more than a strange oddity with some unfortunate design flaws behind it. I know I've ragged on it a lot in this article, but believe me, there are much worse shoot-em-ups out there (Dangerous Seed, Mega Blast, I'm looking at you, assholes) and it's got a certain tragic charm to it. The Mega Drive version isn't that expensive either, and if you want the arcade version, it's on Taito Legends 2 (which, shmup fans, also has the excellent Gun Frontier 'series' and, uh, Space Invaders '95) so it's well worth a shot, just once. You know you want to. Exterminate a couple of bugs today. It'll be good for you.
And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!
Insector X (Aracde) - Unofficial Soundtrack
Here's a little someting that's short and sweet- the arcade Insector X soundtrack. It's extremely quiet in-game, but it does the job good enough, and it's quite chirpy. There's not much to say about it, really... I bet you're wondering why I never bothered with the Mega Drive soundtrack, aren't you? That's because the Mega Drive version's soundtrack sucks. I can't even remember what it sounds like, which is a bad sign. Maybe I'll rip it some day... But not today, pal.
Oh yeah, one more thing... A quick scan from the Mega Drive version's instruction manual:
Ahahaha!
I've forgotten about Yanmer and Kait's activities already. Can I go home yet?