Black Future 88

Black Future 88 is a 2D shoot-em-up game for Nintendo Switch. I picked it up as I bought eight more games to my game collection of Switch games. I bought these games as they were on sale. I paid about 22 or 23 euros per game. These games were on sale so I decided to get a bunch of them. Black Future 88 was the first game that I started to play from these games that I recently bought.

This shoot-em-up has nice looking graphics, animation and visual effects, although the graphics are two-dimensional, and also some nice background music. The content is styled to be sci-fi or cyberpunk. The game offers some nice action. Basically you try to avoid getting hit by enemies ammunition and try to kill them before they get you. As you go on shooting everything that moves you collect items from dead enemies. When you die you start the run over and also your weapons get reset.

You can handle two weapons at a time. So, there are some elements of strategy also. As you die and your run ends you get points which unlock new items to be available in the game. You can also unlock new characters this way.

While this is a fun 2D shoot-em-up the game does get a bit repetitive. Also the story is nonexistent. You get the items completely randomly. The game seems to be looping through as you try to collect more points and level-ups run by run. This is a small game and not your typical triple A game. The price of the game was somewhat low and I also got some discount. So I didn’t pay a whole lot for this one. I actually paid only fourteen euros for this one. I think that is a fair price as I have already spent many hours playing this one.

I am not even near to complete the game. I could find information that Black Future 88 takes about five and a half hours to complete. I think that is very accurate information. As the art in this game is very comfortable the game lacks a deeper insight that would make you more than just superficially addicted to playing it. It’s repetitiveness reminds me of an old MS-DOS game. You could compare it to a shooting game like Space Commanders that is a Space Invaders clone. The only interesting way to try to complete that game is to try to beat the high score which also gets deleted when you actually quit the game. This comparison can tell you how it actually feels to play Black Future 88.

I could recommend this peace of gaming if you like small indie games. If you like to go deep and explore and feel the game and want an interesting story this might not be a game for you. The cheap price feels comfortable. This game is a small one and doesn’t even try compete with games like Breath of the Wild or something like that. So, it is an enjoyable game that has its flaws. I think there are some reasons that make me like this game.

There’s Something About Space Shooters

There is a genre of video games that is called “shoot-em-ups” or “shmups” for short. These shooter types of games have been in my mind since I was a child. I am not sure where I picked up these memories. It was probably from some arcade, restaurant, bar or some other place that I spotted a game or few that were about space, shooting and monsters. The game I have in my mind, or the memory of it, takes place in some space related environment. There are blinking dragons and a flying star fleet ship that is shooting that thing.

Of course this isn’t any real game. It was some unknown game that I had seen somewhere. It is however true that there were games like this, space shoot-em-ups, in the end of the 80s in arcades (for example). When the hottest gaming device was Sega Mega Drive they marketed the gaming console with a promise that it would bring arcades to living rooms of our homes. Maybe the graphics weren’t as impressive but they were something at that time. They were a bit more detailed than those NES games we had seen some years earlier. And the sound that was generated was better in pure quality also.

The screenshot that is related to this  blog post is taken from a game that is called Gynoug. I’m not sure if it is qualified as a space shoot-em-up but it for sure is a shoot-em-up. This game represents the genre. Playing this game can give some view about the it. It is often said that Mega Drive games are hard to play and that they repeat themselves a lot. I am mentioning also the fact that there was no way for the player to save the game and this caused the game usually to be very repetitive. I can understand this better when I think about what kind of a deal it was to design and program a game in 1990s. So the game development methods weren’t as advanced as nowadays. Maybe someone should desing more new games for Mega Drive today?

The influence these games gave to the whole industry of game development is undeniable. The key to success inside space shoot-em-ups is to move to correct direction at correct time and shooting all of time and accurately. I can already see how programmers coded the behavior of the monster you are shooting. Often you can recognize the pattern. Then you move according to where you see you have the position that enables you to not get hit by a missile or any other particle that is headed at you. This can be fun. Nowadays you do see the limitations of the games designed in the past. Althought there is a lot to learn from these games. I definitely recommend you to play some shooter game like this. This game can be Zero Wing, M.U.S.H.A. or Gynoug but there are also other good ones.

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