BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge (SNES)

Today as requested, I'm taking a quick look at BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge, a SNES arcade port with a shiny chrome logo and absolutely zero title screen music. Looks like it should be called Blaze-On, but isn't.

Ah, it's one of those horizontally scrolling shoot 'em ups. I always struggle to find anything to say about these to be honest, as they're a bit... well, shallow. It would appear that I am supposed to fly over to the right and shoot at waves of enemy ships until they run out or I explode. Dodging behind them into the vastness of infinite space is of course forbidden by space-law.

I should probably give the coin-op a quick look as well, see if there's any obvious differences.

Arcade

Oh shit, the original arcade game has a pixelled intro cutscene showing my fighter unloading superheated plasma death into something that's bothering it from off screen! Or perhaps it's shooting at nothing, who knows?

If it was me in the pilot seat I'd be shooting at nothing for sure. I mean if the skies are clear then that just means that the next wave is about to turn up any second now, so I might as well send some bullets over to meet them.

Arcade

Having proven his superiority over the immaterial forces of nothing once again, our hero allows himself a grin. But the pilot's brief moment of smugness is soon interrupted by an actual enemy flying in.

Gotta say, I love that camera angle. Way more interesting than just a straight forward shot from outside the cockpit. Nice touch how they used the mirrored helmet to show the incoming threat and his reaction at the same time.

Arcade

"This is Space Fighter Alpha 1 to base, I've got something on my scanner."
"We recieve you Alpha 1, can you identify the hostile?"
"Not with all this shit on my screen. I've got multiple flickering reticles, pointless diagonal bars, a couple of unlabelled vu meters and some unreadable text that doesn't hang around long enough to make any sense of."

Actually now I'm curious about what that text actually says.

Something about cosmic diapers? I give in.

Arcade

Oh, apparently it said 'guns ain't gonna work on this one, try the missiles instead'. Either that or he used up the last of his ammo while he was dogfighting with empty space earlier.

Arcade

Well the missiles seem to have disabled it for now (and ruined the paint job), but it looks otherwise undamaged. As long as it's intact it's a potential threat, so there's only one thing left for our heroic pilot to do now. He points his fighter directly on target, throttles up...

Arcade

...and rams it straight up the mech's ass.

Once inside he's able to hijack the enemy's mech and use it against them. He even found time to give it a quick respray to give it a red paint job.

That's what happens in the arcade version anyway; the SNES version has none of this sadly. I guess it wouldn't fit on an 8 megabit cartridge and they didn't want to switch up to a more expensive cart with more memory. Annoyingly they took the co-op mode out as well, which makes absolutely no sense to me. The SNES did have two controller ports on the front last time I checked and these games are often so much better when you have a sidekick.

Alright back to the SNES game then and... oh crap I just lost a life to like the third enemy. In my defense, my ship's bullets are ridiculously slow. Fortunately I do have lives, so the game isn't that cruel.

Oh! I was using the wrong gun. These blue shots are much faster and I even have a burst fire button so I don't have to keep tapping it. So if these are actually the guns, then that thing I was firing off before must be the missile!

Hey you up there in the ugly purple mech, fly down here a sec, I want to try something.

The missiles turned it blue, just like in the intro. Awesome, I'm stealing this. Then we'll see how they like it when I fire a screen-filling pulse of bullets their way for a change.

And now I'm at the bit where the walls appear, complete with enemy turrets, as is tradition.

Annoyingly this thing only seems to have two way fire and my ship's missiles have been replaced by some kind of close range energy blast that I only get three shots with. Still, it's a step up in firepower from my puny fighter, and getting new mechs is the only way I can upgrade seeing as there's no power-ups.

Arcade

Here's the arcade version for comparison. It has a few more colours and a wider resolution, but otherwise looks pretty much the same to me. It seems like they did a great job porting this over to the SNES. In fact I think the music actually sounds better on the SNES sound hardware than on the arcade's FM synth chip: SNES Level 1 Music vs. Arcade Level 1 Music.

Also look at that, my mech has a three way shot in this! I guess I must have broken one of my guns somehow on the SNES version.

Aw crap, I don't like this. These tiny green fighters like to dart in from behind me, hover at the other side of the screen for a bit, then suddenly home in on me. The good news is that they're flicking and intangible when they first appear, so I do have a fair shot at dodging them. The bad news is, they're all flickering, so you can only see half the fighters surrounding me right now in this screenshot.

Well, it turns out that I'm crap at dodging dart fighters. Somehow in my heart, I've always known.

My faithful mech sadly didn't survive the onslaught, but it's okay, as the thing acted like an extra hit-point and I was able to eject my fighter and go hijack another one. This time I've grabbed a mech with high-heels and, uh, a crotch rocket, which is armed with a single superlaser. No secondary weapon this time, though I can move the gun up and down a bit. Not aim it, just move it.

Well this can't be good. There's no way they'd let me move onto level two without a boss fight. It's a sacred unbreakable law of shoot 'em ups.

Oh, if you're wondering why I'm still firing here in hyper-spacewarp, it's because I never stop firing. I'm keeping that burst-fire button held down, ain't nothing's going to catch me by surprise.

The boss fight is grid of lights? I... can't say I saw that coming.

Random squares are lighting up in turn, so I'm going to get myself into a position to shoot at wherever the light eventually stops, working from the theory that it's where the bad things will pour out of.

Arcade

My plan worked out perfectly, right up to the point where turrets popped up from six unlit doors and blew my mech to pieces in a single volley. It seems I have keep firing at the target until the guns are about to shoot, then immediately dodge out of the way of their bullets. Which is a little tricky when they're surrounding me.

Then the guns and target all fold back under the doors, and we play the 'guess where the light's gonna stop' game again.

Well it turns out I'm still crap at boss fights too. Got myself blown up good. On the plus side the game did give me a continue, though that's not a great deal of use to me when it spawns me right back at the very start of the level. Which is also the very start of the game.

Arcade

The arcade version on the other hand restarted me in the middle of the level, back next to those green dart fighters that I hate so much. Hang on, did I just disable one of them then?

Oh shit, I can hijack a dart fighter! Man it'll be nice to grab that and annoy someone else for a change.

Arcade

Crap, this ship is incredibly fast, but a pain in the ass to control. On the plus side hitting the secondary weapon button actually turns on the intangible ghost mode, so I can phase through objects harmlessly.

But my dreams of intangibility soon hit a substantial snag as my dart fighters was almost immediately blown to pieces due to piss-poor piloting. The thing just never quite ended up where I was trying to steer it.

Meanwhile back on the SNES version (and back near the start of the level), I just accidentally got my top gun blown off as I entered the area with the walls again. Which is a bit awkward as the top wall is lined with turrets and now I can't hit any of them easily. Suddenly the corridors seems a whole lot more difficult that it was first time around. All I can do here is dodge the bullets as the come, while trying to take out the fighters when I can.

Damn, I'm actually losing lives here now, at the very start of the very first level. I'm terrible!


EVENTUALLY, BACK AT THE DOOR LIGHT BOSS FIGHT.

Come on, the target's I'm meant to be shoot here has just turned red, surely that must mean it's about to blow up. I just need to survive just a little longer. I've no lives left and no mech to give me armour, but if I can dodge the next wave of bullets I'm sure I can win this fight and move on. Otherwise it's back to square one again. So no pressure.

I FINALLY BLEW THE SHIT OUT OF THAT BOSS! Now it's stage two at last and, oh shit it's those fucking darts again. I was kinda hoping I'd left these things behind forever. Boom, there goes my ship, and with it that final life I was struggling to hold on to

Fortunately the game seems to have infinite credits (or at least a lot of them) and I'm only 5 seconds into the level, so if it restarts me at the beginning of this stage I won't have to replay much.

Oh look at that! I just managed to squeeze through the gap in the asteroids with my new mech. Expert manoeuvring there. It's a shame I didn't manage to blow any of the engines up though. I may have survived here, but my most hated of all my inanimate rock accelerating adversaries has also survived.

Arcade

Aha, got them on the arcade version! They've stopped dead in space,

And now I'm trapped here behind an impenetrable, immovable wall of asteroids, as I automatically scroll toward my inevitable rocky doom. I didn't really think this through really did I?

Meanwhile on the version of the game where I didn't lose my mech by smashing it into a wall of rock, I'm actually doing pretty well. This particular model of mech has a forward shot and up to three homing missiles at a time (depending on how much damage I've taken). Infinite ammo too. It's very nice and I think I'll keep it. 

Arcade

It's a different situation entirely on the arcade game, as some dart fighters decided to join in with the yellow ships and harass me while I'm vulnerable. I find it hard enough to dodge these bastards at the best of times, but I've got incoming fire to avoid here as well. A few seconds later I'd used up another continue and was back at the start of the level again.


MUCH LATER.

The good news is, I've finally reached the level two boss! But bad news is that he took me out almost instantly with his turrets and now I'm getting thrown back to the start of the level again. Actually I think I'll just quit here.


BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge seems like a pretty decent game so far; it looks good, sounds good, and nothing stands out as being obviously bullshit about the gameplay (plus it has infinite continues... maybe!) The lack of power-ups means it's missing the joy of working to upgrade your weapons and ship and eventually become an unstoppable engine of destruction, but on the plus side it's also missing the horror of getting hit, losing all your powered up weapons, and ending up as a pathetic weakling unable to destroy the next wave of fighters. There are definitely worse ways to fly to the right while shooting things at least.

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Got anything to say about all that stuff I just said about BlaZeon? You're welcome to leave a comment.