"Will blaze lasers be enough?!"

“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

Console ports of arcade SHMUPs are far from a rarity. In times past, the market was flooded with them. But something about that tried and true formula always keeps me coming back, even today.

BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge is a horizontal-scrolling SHMUP, which just happens to be my favorite kind. The visuals look similar to the R-Type series, but with more emphasis on mechanical than organic elements. Unfortunately, the game moves in a fairly “choppy” manner, giving the impression of slowdown even when there are little to no enemies on the screen.

One of the strangest things about BlaZeon is that defeated enemies never drop anything. There are no powerups or score modifying items whatsoever. But that isn’t to say that you’ll never have access to new weapons and abilities.

The core mechanic behind BlaZeon is the ability to take on the form of enemy ships. By using your secondary fire button, you can freeze certain ships and even flying robots (perhaps Bio-Cyborgs?), fly into their frozen silhouette, and morph into them. This will give you that enemy’s unique weapon as well as allow you to take a few hits before reverting back to your normal ship.

This is definitely an interesting feature, and by far the game’s biggest strength. But it isn’t without its problems. Taking on the form of too big an enemy can do you little good in certain situations. Between now impossible to dodge bullet patterns and a few tight terrain sections, you’ll wish you weren’t suddenly four times as large as you were before. Some of them just control downright awful. One ship in particular is so fast that even so much as a slight tap on the d-pad will have you move several ship-lengths away. I would usually lose this form shortly after receiving it by crashing into two asteroids I was attempting to move between.

Unfortunately, this cool mechanic can’t save the game from what has to be some of the worst pacing I’ve ever seen in a videogame. First off, there are often short pauses between waves of enemies leaving you to just wait. Worst of all, though, are the long pauses.

On the way to one of the game’s bosses, there is a moment where you’re just floating through space waiting. After that, you dodge a couple of slow moving asteroids. Then, I kid you not, from the moment the last asteroid leaves the screen until the moment the boss BEGINS to enter the screen, there are literally 37.5 seconds (counted by stopwatch) of floating through space with nothing but your ship and a slow moving star background on the screen. Considering that I failed the boss a decent number of times, I can confirm that this wait time is not a fluke.

While the game does re-spawn you right away when you die and there are infinite continues, parts of the game still manage to be surprisingly difficult. Part of this is due to the fact that most of the levels are actually two levels combined, despite what the game would like you to believe. This means if you finally beat that boss you’ve been retrying, you’re really only halfway there. Lose the rest of your lives fighting the next boss and you’re back to fighting that first boss (as well as getting to him in the first place). Stage 4 decided to keep going after I had already defeated two bosses, complete with uneventful waiting periods.

Why did I pick this game?

I love SHMUPs. Even though I’m not particularly great at them, there is some charm that they have that I just can’t get enough of. Despite how similar many of them are, I always crave more. There is a certain purity to the reflexes displayed while dodging and shooting that I hope never leaves gaming.

That being said, it’s becoming increasingly rare as time goes on that I find a SHMUP for the Super Nintendo that I haven’t already played. Not only had I not previously played BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge, I had never even heard of it.

How does it hold up with time?

Not well. The ability to transform into enemy ships and utilize their powers is great, but it is virtually the game’s only strength aside from some catchy tunes in its soundtrack. The pacing kills any potential enjoyment of the game. The bosses are also pretty disappointing and occasionally have very cheap attacks. The game manages to straddle the line between bad and mediocre. With the countless other SHMUPs out there, you can definitely do better than BlaZeon.

Tags: Atlus, BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge, Friday Old Games, Shmup, SNES, Super NES

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.