Game: Zero Wing
Platform: Sega Mega Drive/PC Engine/Arcade
Year: 1989
Developer: Toaplan
Genre: Side-Scrolling Shoot 'em Up
Popular culture is a curious thing. What stays and what gets forgotten by the public can be really difficult to predict or to understand. Many elements are branded in our minds, forever to stay there even if you’ve only paid one second of attention to the original thing. And likewise, there are works that, no matter their quality or effort, simply fail to make any kind of impact in the mind of their audiences, no matter how much attention they’re given, and become forgotten in days. What makes something memorable and what doesn’t has been studied by experts for years, trying to analyse how our minds work, and what makes them tick in a certain way. And yet, sometimes, when the stars align, that something extremely unassuming gets all the attention in the world, becoming a significant part of our cultural baggage. Today, we would probably call this phenomena as “memes. This small units contain ideas, concepts or expressions that are able to spread through a community, until it becomes ubiquitous. And in the early 2000s, very few memes were as popular and recognizable as the intro of Zero Wing.
It is impossible to separate the 1989 Genesis space shoot’em up from the infamous “All your base are belong to us” meme. Considered one of the most, if not the most famous case of engrish in all of gaming, the garbled, disjointed and nonsensical intro movie had just enough elements to jump into stardom: dramatic scenes, incomprehensible mistranslated dialogue, 16-bit nostalgia and just the right amount of obscurity to get the gaming public with shock and awe and laughter. However, we have to take into account the importance of the game itself. The meme has become a mainstay in popular culture, but how many people even know the origin of the infamous phrase? And how many have actually played the title? Does it deserve to be remembered beyond the meme?
The first thing Zero Wing shows us is its ill-famed cut scene, which, by the way, comes from the European Mega Drive port, which is the version I’ve played. Pretty much all of you reading this probably know the entire thing from beginning to end, but just in case, I’ll describe it for you. In A.D. 2101, war starts between the “space government” (the good guys’ faction never get a name) and CATS, a humanoid cyborg that manages to surprise the space government and destroys most of their forces in a sudden attack. While gloating of his victory, the Captain of the space government, in a last desperate act, decides to send the Zigs, fighting spaceships to destroy the threat of CATS forever. And that’s it. That’s the plot of the game. This was during the days when plots were mostly an excuse to get the game going, so it’s not exactly surprising they were able to condense the plot in less than two minutes of cut scene and less that twenty lines of dialogue. However, I unironically love this intro. Seriously, in the span of two minutes we get to know everything we need to know about the game: we know why we’re fighting for (“for great justice”), we know who we’re fighting against (“CATS”), and we know how high the stakes really are (“All Your Base Are Belong to Us”, “You are on the way to destruction”, “You have no chance to survive make your time”). Seeing the bad guy destroy every important piece of military importance as it were nothing sends a message of how powerful CATS really is, and how desperate the situation is, and it makes it so much satisfying when we take it down with just our small craft. We get emotionally invested through two different means: by making CATS a ruthless and magnificent bastard that manages to capture all of the bases in a surprise masterstroke, while also gloating all the way. The way CATS appears in the main screen really sells its imposing appearance, like the Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back, menacing and imposing against the image of the Captain. The Captain, as well, knows how desperate their situation is, and we see how he has to send the Zigs as a last resort to save the galaxy, trying to maintain his composure and cold mind during the last seconds of his life. He knows he’s going to die, and yet he ultimately sets in motion the events that would bring the end of CATS. He makes the Zigs’ pilots understand the seriousness of the situation, while also reassuring them they know what they’re doing, giving a brief but effective last words that stay with the player throughout the playthrough. We see our Zig ship depart, while the main space station is being blown up. All while one of the best intro themes of all time plays in the background, absolutely enhancing the scene into epic proportions.
You may think I’m making fun of it, but it’s quite the opposite. Engrish aside, this is one of the best intros I’ve ever seen on any videogame. Period. The amount of information and player investment we get is way superior to many of today’s games, confident in their almost movie-like CGI intros and cutscenes. What other videogames need hours to come across this title does in two minutes. The instruction book has more information about the storyline and the world, but why would you need it? The composition, the pacing, the music, the sound design, the surprisingly good sprite artwork… all combines to make one of the most memorable scenes in all gaming. In that sense, it is a shame the engrish really overshadowed the quality of this scene. Not bad for a completely original addition to the port (the original arcade didn’t really have any story, so the developers made it up here).
Intro scene aside, how is the actual gameplay? Well, once we start the game, it’s a very typical space shooter. You control a small ship that shoots lasers to other small and not so small ships. You have two means of defence: one is your trusty lases, that can change depending on the power up you have at the moment. There are three kinds of power ups: the red one, a basic spreader gun, the blue one, powerful multilasers, and the green one, homing projectiles. If you get multiple power ups of the same type, your attack becomes more and more powerful, to the point of being quite broken. The green and blue in particular are rather overpowered, with the green one basically doing all the job for you and the blue one keeping a massive portion of the screen in check at once. Other important power ups are the boost, which increases the speed of your ship, and the bomb, a powerful single use attack against everything in the screen. The other mean of defence is a traction beam, able to capture small craft and throw it back at the enemies, although this is quite dangerous to use since you have to get close to get it, only really useful to capture and throw the bomb power up.
The game follows a side-scrolling format. The screen moves to the right constantly, and you have to avoid or destroy the obstacles in your way. Sometimes you’ll have to be extremely careful not to touch anything: a hit is an instant KO, so try to fly as far away from the walls as possible. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, having to navigate through narrow corridors to continue the level. Also, in some stages there are multiple enemies that appear from the other side of the screen. Although I understand why they did this (to discourage players from just staying at the left bottom of the screen), some kind of warning is needed, otherwise you just suddenly die for no reason. There are eight stages of different length and difficulty, all with different bosses and sub-bosses. The scenarios are quite well decorated, although they are somewhat standard when compared to other Mega Drive games. The colours are somewhat muted sometimes, but that’s probably just a nit-pick of mine. Playing other sidescroller space shooters lately, I really appreciate the size and colour pallet chosen for Zero Wing. This game was set up in space, and it still fares better there, contrasting the blackness of the background with the rest of the elements of the screen quite nicely. A modern example of this would be Sine Mora, where the ship is quite small compared to the rest of the screen, and the attempt of a more realistic look makes the player ship somewhat difficult to see in certain scenes (especially when playing undocked on the Nintendo Switch). Zero wing has a big ship in an environment that allows little to no distraction, and that is great for gameplay. Which is, sadly, not so great. Outside of the bosses, which are fun to play, Zero Wing’s gameplay is quite easy: the level design is somewhat dull at times, and even quite frustrating at worst, especially when the lack of space hinders your movement. The basic mook designs are forgettable, and they are not especially threatening, only offering a challenge in numbers. This is a quite easy game, especially due to the infinite continues, a rarity at the time. Losing all your lives means losing all your score, but you start at the level you left off, so it’s not really a big deal.
The music of the game is some of the best 16-bit tunes out there. Maybe I’m just a sucker for this kind of compositions, but they are amazing, frequently outstaging the gameplay entirely. Not that much to say there, just find a YouTube play list of the OST and judge yourself.
One thing I’d like to mention is that the game has multiple endings, but you wouldn’t know it at first glance. At the final boss, if you don’t destroy a particular part of the enemy in a certain amount of time, CATS escapes and you get the bad ending. Which is weird. After beating the final boss, you get a couple of dancing raisins congratulating you for your victory. It is a Japanese game, after all, so some weirdness had to be added somewhere. If you do destroy the enemy entirely, you get the appropriate good ending, with your damaged ship being rescued by your allies, the mothership sails into the horizon… and you get an image of a raising staring into your soul. What that is or means, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the mascot of the game or the developer team, but is quite jarring for a game that doesn’t have that many silly things in it.
There’s no local multiplayer, which is a shame considering the potential for co-op here, but I guess some levels just don’t have the appropriate design for two player matches.
Zero Wing is a bit of an anomaly. Its level design and difficulty make it probably one of the easiest games of its genre to beat, so it would be great for beginners, but offers very little challenge to seasoned veterans. The presentation is great, until the level design starts going down in quality. The music is awesome, but it complements a gameplay quite mediocre. The highlight of the game is the intro cutscene, which is a shame, they spent their best asset at the very beginning, accessible without the need of even playing it. Maybe more cutscenes in between the levels would’ve been a great incentive for players and to differentiate it from the plethora of other space shooters at the time. How sad it is that the last-minute addition ended up being the key element of the game? As it is, it’s fine. Nothing spectacular, but fine. You can probably beat it in a day, so it won’t even leave you time to get tired of it.
Score: 6.5/10
