When arcade news is slow here, it is always fun to sift through the rich history of games both released and unreleased. Today let’s take a look at an unreleased game from 1993 by Jaleco called Chimera Beast. Earlier this year one of the game’s designers took to Twitter to document this game, which is also available on MAME.
Chimera Beast would easily fall into the weird shooter category. It has a slight XEXEX vibe to it, where that particular game was also a little abnormal when compared to the slew of me-too spaceship scrolling shooter games that flooded the market. You play as an Eater and your primary weapon is a sort of detachable jaw that jumps out to eat the enemies in front of you. By doing so you can collect their DNA and enhance your creature’s abilities. Among different fireball-type projectiles, the tail of your creature also serves as a weapon to protect you from behind since you cannot flip directions. The game was finished despite not getting a release and so there are 7 stages that take place in a number of different environments and enemies (everything from bacteria to moles). There are also two endings, a Bad Ending if you defeat the final boss and a Good Ending where you actually let the final boss defeat you. For the curious, the bad ending is shown in the playthrough video here:
The original arcade board seems to be making rounds to different game centers in Japan if I’m translating the right tweets correctly, this tweet shows a setup at a place called Technopolis; another says an event was held at the Mikato Game Center. To find various drawings of the enemies and other documents related to the game, you can find that being documented here on Twitter. It’s a Japanese channel but there is still plenty of info there to find for those with time and interest to sort through and translate everything. Here’s a few pictures from the Twitter account showing some of the design documents for the game:
Early screen proposal:
And finally one of the many cells showing some enemies:
reminds me of that alpaca game lol… someone should release this officially.
Reminds me of a very poor mans ‘Saint Dragon’ (Jaleco – 1989)
http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=1880&image=1
You can see the lack of quality in this 1993 game, compared to the 1989 title – no wonder poor testing saw it shelved – but also the 90’s was the deluxe & 3DG boom time, and JALECO threw all their cash into their GPSII architecture.
A fun read on this virtually unknown shmup! Thanks for posting this!