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This week's Arcade Archives release is... Tatakae! Big Fighter (Nichibutsu, 1989)

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Only the Japanese ROM (Tatakae! Big Fighter) is included which is a shame, as the other version out there (Sky Robo) has a different level order at the start. Preference Settings allow players to extend the edges of the game screen to see more than you most likely would've seen on a real cabinet.

It's Nichibutsu shmup time again! Not a company or a genre that I know much about, I'll be the first to admit, but Arcade Archives has absolutely been doing its best to teach me about both. This is a pretty interesting one in that you have a standard spaceship that fires straight ahead with a small hitbox but can only take one hit and is destroyed when it touches walls. Press the Transform button and you'll become a huge robot that can aim in eight directions, can take three hits and safely walk and fly against walls, but has a much larger hitbox. When you transform, you're surrounded by protective covering fire for a second, so if you time it right, you can use this to destroy enemy projectiles and even damage enemies! This is pretty alright and there's a nice variety of weapons (your craft has a secondary Beam weapon that changes independent of your normal shot, plus bombs and even and item to stop the screen scroling for a moment!) but it is a little slow for my liking, and the checkooints seem pretty rough. I think the novelty of the robot being able to fire in all directions helps smooth things over a little though, certainly one of the more interesting Nichibutsu shmups. Sorry I don't have much else to say, though!

Still, this is a pretty noteworthy release. As mentioned on arcade-history, this was one of Nichibutsu's last traditional arcade games, and from this point onwards they'd go all-in on the salacious mahjong games they'd been making throughout the '80s like Ojousan and City Love. This did bring us the completely bizarre Mahjong the Lady Hunter where the protagonist is a Batman-esque vigilante with the Nichibutsu owl as his logo, so maybe it wasnt all bad, but don't expect any of those games to show up on Arcade Archives any time soon! Still, there's a few other Nichibutsu games we haven't seen yet, in particular Dacholer and UFO Robo Dangar, so they're not finished just yet!
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This week's Arcade Archives release is... Moon Shuttle (Nichibutsu, 1981)

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EU Browser eShop link not up yet
Not available on US eShop

Only one ROM is included, and there are no extra Preference Settings.

In the depths of space, the Moon Shuttle makes its dangerous journey! Unyieling in its mission, it can only move up, down and forward (either at a standard speed or a little faster) but both deadly meteor showers that shift and move and alien ships armed to the teeth are in the way. Fortunately, the shuttle is equipped with a Wave Motion Gun (borrowed from the Space Battleship Yamato, of course) to blast through the meteor storms and take on hostile ships, but there's a limit of three on-screen at a time, so try and make your shots count. Good luck, and never give up!

Excellent, our first Arcade Archives post here on Dreamwidth and we get to mention Nichibutsu's obsession with the moon! They released so many games with the word Moon in the title- the most famous is of course Moon Cresta (part of a series that more recently had a revival in the form of Sol Cresta) but there's also Moon Trek, Moon Quasar, Moon Raker, Moon Alien Part II... When it comes to Nichibutsu, the moon's where it's at! At least until they hit on the idea of making strip mahjong games forever. Anyway, Hamster owns the entire IP library of Nichibutsu, so inbetween the bigger games from the likes of Namco and Taito, we get smaller releases like this, from the 'golden age' of early arcade games, and they're usually pretty interesting, especially since a lot of them are new to me! Like this one, I hadn't played before this release but it's neat, with the meteor shower scenes requiring precision aiming (and, as you advance between scenes, they become increasingly dangerous with different 'lanes' of meteors moving in different directions) and the alien encounter scenes demanding quick reflexes to avoid getting blasted and different enemy types showing up as you get through the waves. It's certainly got presentation on its side- this looks pretty nice for a 1981 game, and it's even got some deeply-crunchy voiceclips telling you "NEVER GIVE UP!" and "GOOD LUCK!" depending on your performance in the meteor shower scenes. How charming!

June 2025

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