APRIL 2017 UPDATE www.arcadequartermaster.com
The fighting game galore continues! Four new shrines are up in the shrine, including one of the iconic shooting games of the 80s!
BATTLE K-ROAD: One of PsiKyo’s attempts at the fighting game genre, they opted for the more grounded nature of martial arts tourneys. There are 7 principal fighting styles in the game, each with 2 practitioners. Similar to Karateka, Yie-Ar Kung-Fu and Karate Champ before it, all fighters have similar command inputs but with different moves based on their respective combat style. Despite the relatively ordinary fighters in the tournament, there are 2 characters resembling the actors who portrayed Terminator T-800 and T-1000; plus a final boss against a bear, in a game released the same year as the first Tekken.
DARAKU TENSHI: Continuing the trend with more realistic fighting, PsiKyo’s the Fallen Angels is set on the apocalyptic landscape of Eden, and the darkly-saturated backgrounds capture the bleak atmosphere. Certain characters will look familiar against The King of Fighters series, where in fact, the devs involved in the game later went to SNK to design fighters for KoF’99 and Garou MotW, and it shows. Cool and Harry are clearly the bases for K’ and Maxima, Roche and Torao put Freeman and Khushnood’s violent offensives in the front line. Even South Town’s final bosses Grant and Kain are counterparts to the bleak Eden’s mob bosses Trigger and Carlos.
POWER INSTINCT LEGENDS: Similar to SNK’s attempt to bring its characters together that started KoF’94, Atlus’ Goketsuji Legends pits all the characters from its past 2 titles for a grand 2-vs-2 battle royale, which later became a staple with several other fighting franchises. Both Otane and Oume return as playable characters, and with 17 choices in the roster, it opens a huge number of possible pair-up combinations with their own tag-team names. And of course, it retains the mechanic of super moves from the previous game to gain an edge over the opponent with a full power meter. This time, the final opponent is an unorthodox martial artist named Chuck, paired-up with a Kuroko.
CABAL: Cabal is Taito/Fab’s collab for a shooting-gallery style game, one of the most famous for its genre which later spawned the likes of NAM-1975 and Wild Guns. Players have a machine gun and grenades to clear each of the 25 colorful-stages. Each stage has 5 levels: 4 sub-areas and 1 boss area. Clear all enemies in the area to move on. To get new supplies of ordnance, you must destroy certain soldiers and smash the surrounding buildings to produce score plates or extra grenades. To survive even the toughest bosses, mastering the skill of strafing while shooting is required.
More of the older shrines are having both major and minor overhauls, including the character sheet revamps. And lastly, AQM is now also in Instagram, where I’ll also post more randomness, like arcade machines, action figs, and some of my collections. Enjoy the new arcade shrines!