Gyruss, despite being an excellent game, just can’t seem to get a decent break. Combining the greatest elements of arcade shooters of the 80’s, it took the action of Galaga and the mechanics of Tempest and brought them together into a fast-paced, extremely intense shooter. Developed by Yoshiki Okamoto, who would later go on to work for Capcom and create such legendary franchises as Final Fight, Street Fighter, and countless others, Gyruss was released to arcades in 1984. Despite being far ahead of its time visually and aurally (it was the first arcade game to feature true stereo sound), Gyruss came at a time after two million ET cartridges were buried in a New Mexican desert and the revitalization of the arcade industry in the early 90’s. After mediocre ports to the Atari 2600, NES, and Game Boy Advance, Gyruss has been released to the arcade Mecca of Xbox Live. While the arcade game can easily warrant a perfect score of ten to this reviewer, the curse seems to live on as Live version suffers from horrible bugs and half-baked attempts at improvements. Despite its flaws, Gyruss is still a good enough game that warrants forgiveness to the loss in translation. As was the case for shooting games at the time, Gyruss spares the storyline and shoves you into the game. All you know is that you’re a nameless pilot screaming through deep space with one goal: get back to Earth. Unfortunately, a nameless force stands in the way of you and that celebratory cigar waiting for you back home. If you truly want your R&R, you’ll have to fight through them while visiting the exotic locales of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars along the way. With the “enhanced” features turned off, Gyruss is more or less an arcade perfect port in every way, even down to the six-digit score limitations. While this is good for purists, hardcore fans of the game will be a little disappointed as this means if you score 999950, that’s as high as you’ll ever go and your spot will be forever cemented at the top of the Live rankings. Gyruss is played amidst a backdrop of speeding stars and to the tune of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” which if the name of the song doesn’t ring a bell, its tune definitely will. Just think of vampires. Your ship moves in a circular pattern around the edge of the screen while enemy ships fly onto the screen in set patters that are similar to, but more complex than Galaga. Pattern memorization is a must if you want to succeed. Destroying every ship in an incoming wave will score you bonus points, while anything you miss will retreat into the distance to dive back at you later. Once all of the waves have flown in, the chaos really begins as ships will dive towards you with guns blazing. As if this isn’t enough, you’ll also find yourself dodging speeding asteroids and slow moving electric barricades that are just waiting for you to crash into them. While your ship starts with a meager single cannon, a power-up will appear that will double your firepower and give you some semblance of hope against the onslaught of enemy ships coming at you. Be careful though, as the double shot appears just as the enemy ships start raining fire on you, and will even take a few shots at you itself, making this one of the only games where your own power-ups can be your doom. Each stage in the game will place you a certain number of warps away from the nearest planet, with three warps being par for the course. Once you have cleared all of the enemy ships from a stage, you’ll warp one stage closer to the next planet. Upon reaching a planet, you’ll be treated to a challenge stage where waves of ships move across the screen in patterns, like a shooting gallery, they’ll never shoot back which serves as the only breather you’ll get from the intense battles awaiting you. If you manage to destroy everything that moves during a challenge stage, you’ll be rewarded not only with bragging rights, but also with a huge score bonus to boot. As you venture closer to Earth, the action gets faster, enemy patterns become even more unpredictable, and asteroids fly more frequently. Later stages can be overwhelming for novices, but a little practice will set things straight and make you look like gold in return. Achievements are awarded for reaching certain planets later in the game, going seven stages without picking up a double shot, and scoring in the game’s multiplayer modes. For anyone who hung out in arcades as a kid, multiplayer is the proverbial icing on the cake. Versus mode splits the screen between two players as they battle to see who can get the highest scores. When everyone is out of lives, the player with the highest score is declared the winner. The biggest surprise is the co-op modes, which lets two players team up and earn points towards a combined score. For anyone who has missed the thrill of arcade competition, the versus mode does a great job of bringing back that competitive spirit. The co-op is a great addition as well, but this is where the good about this conversion of the game ends. Even when playing in the classic settings, every multiplayer game over Xbox Live is riddled with general slowness and random hiccups. Depending on how far away you are from the other player, these hiccups can become more frequent and can result in unneeded death. One game-crippling bug exists in the game’s co-op mode. While the limitations of the game only allow a total score of six digits, it does a good job of posting the score to the online leader boards for single player mode. However, in co-op, rolling the high score back to zero results in a ton of wasted time, which means, both players (providing both survive) will have to kill themselves before the score rolls, or else, you’ll be starting all over again. While this bug obviously won’t be experienced by everyone, the hardcore crowd can really wish for some amount of consistency between the two modes. Even more, had the six digit bug been fixed in the first place, it would have been to everyone's benefit. Let me just get this out of the way, the game’s “enhanced” graphical settings are downright ugly. The visual style uses 3D models in place of sprites, which not only makes the game look clunky, but the models just look amateur. While the classical double shot power-up is represented by an orange ball with green electricity surrounding it, the “enhanced” power-up is a flat-shaded ball. Instead of looking like an enhancement of the original game, as was the case with Time Pilot, Gyruss looks more like a homebrew homage to the original game. It get even worse during multiplayer sessions where even though the screen is split vertically, if the player on the left reaches a planet, it will only appear on the left player’s screen while the right player is shown speeding towards some sort of ghost planet. The only redeeming thing enhanced mode has going for it is the rotating back drop behind the starfield featuring nebulas and space gas, but even that has its drawbacks as the enemy ships that collect in the middle of the screen are harder to see. You’re best left to the simplistic, and in many ways better looking classic settings. On the sound side of things, the enhanced sounds are slight improvements in some ways. The soundtrack is redone, but still isn’t as impressive as the classic, though that could be the purist in this reviewer talking. If you choose to go with the classic sounds, expect nothing short of disappointment. The soundtrack and in-game sounds sound like corrupted MP3s and seem to play at a fraction of their normal speed. What’s worse is that the drum samples are non-existent which really takes away from the action. The sound issues become worse during multiplayer games, but given the consistent performance issues, this comes as no surprise. All things mentioned, Gyruss is a great game that is more than worthy of getting a decent port. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen this time around.
Seeing as i'd never played Gyruss before, i thought OK nothing to lose.....prolly gonna be another generic shooter, or a copy of time pilot. as soon as i got into the game i was like....oh cool, and once i'd gotten in... Read Full Review
Gameplay: You control a ship and basically can move on the outer rim of the screen (like in Tempest). Throughout the levels you'll be shooting the same ships over and over again, trying to dodge any hits so you can keep ... Read Full Review
