![]() ![]() Absolutely legendary design stuff, but when he was focused on compositions in his early days: incredible. It was done by Taro Kudo, who is maybe more known for his design work in UFO: A Day in the Life or Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland. The whole soundtrack is absolutely amazing. The music, on the other hand, is one of my favorite sounds to be processed through the SNES sound chip. However, this level isn’t as visually arresting as the second level. Remember the Hengsha megacity in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? Apparently, that concept was already in Axelay in 1992. The background once again depicts a space colony, but this one is like a double-decker. Then you get to yet another awesome city level, which I know as “Mother,” because that’s the track name of the song that plays over top. You know, the one that can’t take stairs but can blow away a corporate executive? Screenshot by Destructoid Tell your children not to walk my way Just use the setting as an extra bit of visual pizazz.Īnd then you fight the bad robot from Robo-Cop. Don’t even make the game about living in space. More like Kamurocho from Yakuza, but in space. But not like, the Citadel from Mass Effect. Just looking at it makes me want a game set on an O’Neill cylinder. You see the city, the natural areas between, and there’s a part where a bridge crosses empty space. You essentially fly from one end of the cylinder to the other as it rotates in the background. It’s a type of theoretical design that uses centrifugal motion to simulate gravity. It has you fly into an orbital colony that’s set up in an O’Neill cylinder. The second level is one that really sticks with me. It’s like the developers tried to create an effect, failed, and were like, “I still like the look of it.” Screenshot by Destructoid O’Neill CylinderĪxelay alternates to horizontal shooting sections that are a lot more conventional but still visually impressive. The sort-of misty appearance of it is striking. It’s still really cool, and I would honestly be shocked if there was anything else like it in video games. ![]() I will say the effect is better on a CRT screen, but not much. It’s like the entire game is just painted on a conveyor belt, and you’re watching the very end of it as objects roll up over the end. Large enemies will actually distort toward you like they’re curling around the edge of the world. But the way they do it makes it look like the curvature of the planet is about 10 meters in front of you, and everything is affected by it. It kind of looks like you’re flying toward the horizon. I think it’s trying to do a perspective that makes it look like you’re following the ship, but that’s not how it looks. It uses the SNES’ mode-7 sprite scaling to give a 3D effect (update: this was done with a raster effect rather than mode-7), but it’s so difficult to really pin down what it’s trying to do. However, the visuals kick into high gear in the first level.Īxelay approaches vertical stages in a novel way, and it’s one that’s really hard to describe. The soundtrack immediately starts crawling into your ears and laying eggs in your tympanic cavity. ![]() But that forceful snap means that it’s on. Someone snaps a locket shut for some reason. There’s a planet that gets covered in explosions, goes dark, and is left just outlined by a corona. They’re narratives that aren’t really worth telling, and many of them just don’t.Īxelay could have skipped this too, but it decided to do it in the same way it approaches everything in the genre: as stylishly as possible. That’s a completely made-up number, but off the top of my head, I can name a few. This is the storyline of approximately 80% of shoot-’em-ups. But thankfully, there’s, like, this one spaceship that is really great. Screenshot by Destructoid It’s onĬontinuing the theme of being unremarkable, Axelay’s story is that an evil empire is invading a peaceful planetary system and absolutely kicking its ass. Axelay is, by most metrics, a pretty flacid shoot-’em-up.Įxcept, it’s still worth experiencing if you have eyes and ears. Its weapon system is a little lackluster. The formula could be described as a close companion to Life Force or Abadox where it alternates between vertical and horizontal scrolling stages. I can’t say that Axelay is much different. Most of the time, you maneuver your spaceship, unicorn, or spaceship with boxing gloves around on an automatically scrolling background until a much larger boss shows up. It’s a formula that has been utilized many times, and frequently the changes are very small. I find scrolling shoot-’em-ups to be one of the most difficult genres to talk about, right up there with puzzle games. ![]()
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