Day 21 : Zinc
Hello ladies and gentlemen welcome to Day 21 of the daily blog challenge. So today I am looking at another emulator in the form of Zinc.
Zinc is an emulator that covers Sony ZN1 and ZN2 boards. It also can run Namco System 11 games. Now both Sony arcade boards seem to based on PlayStation 2 hardware.
Now Zinc itself is a command line based emulator so I have been running it using the Frontend ZincGUI.
Now I admit quite a lot of the games are fighting games which I am not a huge fan of, However the games emulated do seem to run faster than the MAME versions.
Zinc is available in a complete pack including frontends, plug-ins and the emulator itself.
So here is a lot at some of the games
1. Strider 2
The Strider 2 arcade was never released outside of Japan and Asia. However I do believe it was released on PlayStation 2 on disc for the rest of the world.
Obviously a sequel to the original Strider. You once again take the role of Hiryu Strider and you must fight your way through various levels fighting robots and various bosses. Ultimately you have to beat the Grand Master who is ruling the world
I must admit the game is fast, furious and actually quite fun. However it is quite brutal if you fall off the levels which is pretty easy to do.
2. Raystorm
RayStorm is a shoot em up from Taito where the player control a starship, the R-Gray, in its mission to destroy the Secilia Federation before it destroys Earth.
Simple principle and simple gameplay but definitely an interesting game. You have two weapons on your ship. You have the laser which is used most of the time. However you also have missiles which lock on to the various targets before you can fire them using some of your special weapon power.
The game is pretty straightforward shooter territory but that doesn’t mean its an easy game to beat.
3 . G-Darius
Once again another shoot-em up from Taito but this is from the forth instalment of the Darius series.
G-Darius is a prequel story that revolves around a conflict between the humanoids of Amnelia and cyborg/chimera biovessels known as the "Thiima" (meant to mean simply "deliverer of death").
The Thiima had been aroused by the Amnelian army's use of the weapon A.N. (All-Nothing) to annihilate the world Blazar, whom Amnelia had been at war with over jurisdiction over the moon Mahsah. Determined to protect their existence, and long ago programmed to protect the universe from just such threats as A.N., the Thiima swarmed on Amnelia.
Although the armed forces were badly ravaged, Amnelian scientists and engineers were able to make use of both A.N. and reverse engineered Thiiman technology/life systems to create the Silver Hawk fighters.
Ultimately, two pilots—Sameluck Raida and Lutia Feen—are chosen to perform a decisive attack on the main Thiima base: Kazumn, a satellite of the planet Darius.
A difficult shoot em up but it has the new twist this time you can use capture balls to grab enemies to fight on your side.
That’s three that interested me, the rest are fighter games such as Street Fighter Ex Plus, Plasma Sword and more of that ilk. If that’s your bag it may interest you.
One thing I will say about Zinc. You really do need some form of game controller to play the games. You can set them to keys but for best response some form of Xbox 360 style controller or better recommended.