Arcade Archives: D-Day

This week's Arcade Archives release is... D-Day (Jaleco, 1984)

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Just the one ROM this time, and no Preference Settings either, too bad!

Well, this is a surprise- welcome back, Jaleco! The last time we saw a Jaleco game on Arcade Archives was Soldam all the way back in 2021, so I figured we wouldn't be seeing them again, but here we are! Unfortunately, the game they chose to come back with isn't exactly a classic, and it's not even a Jaleco game- this was developed by E.L.S. as mentioned in the comments of LordBBH's Push to Reject video on the game, who mostly appear to have done work for companies like Jaleco and Sega. This is a weird vertical shmup of sorts where you control a rather awkward battleship making its way across the ocean, taking on land, sea and air targets along the way. The way you do this is by juggling two different targetting reticles- one that fires machine-gun fire upwards to take out anything in the air (this includes missiles launched by sea targets, so keep that in mind) and another that fires missiles to target ground and sea-based targets. These reticles move at different speeds and stop moving at different parts of the screen, so actually aiming where you can get tricky, especially when you factor in that your boat only moves once you drag the aerial cursor to the left or right edge, and it moves s l o w l y. You'll have to master moving this thing too, because land masses along the way will sink you if you graze them!

I can sort-of see what they were going for here, but it's a very slow, plodding game that feels really awkward to play. Keeping track of which reticle you need in which part of the screen gets really confusing, so you'll try and hit something with the wrong reticle and die because there's absolutely no way to course correct fast enough (especially since you can't move diagonally- this is a four-way game only) and dodging any missiles or shots coming your way is not an option. It's just not a game that really grabs me, which is a shame. Still, I get the feling Jaleco may have taken notes from this game for Field Combat, which has a similar slow player ship with a reticle but does more interesting things with it. Field Combat is one of the games not currently in Arcade Archives, so I'd definitely like to see that in the future. There's not a huge amount of Jaleco arcade games left for ACA, but Avenging Spirit and NMK's Jaleco-publoshed Psychic 5 would be nice (especially since the latter's modern remake is apparently not very good at all). The big fish, though, is Chimera Beast. C'mon, it doesn't matter that it never got officially released, make it happen!