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// Captain Tomaday | キャプテン・トマディ // Neo Geo // Intro/Title/Attract Demo

#Captain Tomaday #キャプテン・トマディ #Neo Geo #MiSTerFPGA #crt tv

Captain Tomaday

On a dark and stormy night, a mad botanist is doing a bit of research in his laboratory, when a tomato plant near some chemicals drops a tomato into a beaker. The beaker explodes, and out comes a tomato with a face and limbs that says "MUTATE!" The scientist, covered in soot and ash, gives the new tomato a tired expression, as if he feels he is getting too old for this stuff. The tomato then runs off to stop the forces of evil eggplant aliens, under the name Captain Tomaday!

The story of Captain Tomaday, as taken from attract mode sequences. This was a little-known 1998 Neo Geo title from Visco. You control Captain Tomaday, a tomato who is mutated by falling into a scientist's fluid, gaining sentience and apparently military rank as well. This allows him to readily join other fictional heroes like Captain America, Captain Hammer and Captain Caveman. It's reassuring to know that if I ever inadvertently gain superpowers, I'll be at least vaulted past the first two rungs of officer hierarchy.

Back to the game itself. This was clearly inspired by Konami's TwinBee series. That may not be evident from these pictures, but once you get to playing, all doubts are removed. Captain Tomaday himself, fighting from an overhead perspective, attacks with two fists, one at each side (and each controlled with a separate fire button.) That, combined with his rounded form, is enough to raise TwinBee similarities, but enemies also come out in similar wave-like patterns, sweeping into and off of the screen in rapid motion. As a final nod, these enemies often drop power-ups which can be hit with your fist attacks and bounced back up onto the screen for an extended period of time.

So, how does the game actually compare to its inspiration? Not that well. There's barely any more complexity here than in the original TwinBee of 1985. Enemy attacks and the act of blasting them out of the sky get repetitive in a hurry. While Tomaday can take on multiple forms through power-ups (including a baby and a cat), these felt random to me and made me tend to avoid power-ups if I happened to have a weapon that was working for me. While you can bounce bonus items in the air by shooting them, I didn't see where it had any impact, unlike the changing of bell colors in TwinBee to control what kinds of things you would get from them. And apart from a couple of tricky sequences, the game is just far too easy. Your fists auto-fire immediately as soon as they return from wherever you shot them off to; if they bounce off an enemy, they'll come back very quickly and fire again. With a little skill and a half-decent power-up, you can shred bosses in seconds by remaining in front of them with this rapid fire ability.

On the plus side, the game has some really nice, colorful environments that take you to a variety of locales. It has a cartoonish nature that's lighthearted and that, along with its reduced difficulty, provides a great change of pace from the serious and sometimes sadistically hard shoot-em-ups of the late 90s.

#Captain Tomaday #Visco #Neo Geo #1990s games #Art in Video Games