Before you ask, no this is not an old story from 1992. Lately the trend towards big name, big cost games has been gaining steam but so has the occasional indie arcade game development. We’ve covered games by NG Dev Team which have been designed for NeoGeo MVS cabinets or Killer Queen Arcade and now we have a new upcoming title – Skycurser by Griffin Aerotech.
From their website, here is the description of what the game is all about:
“SKYCURSER” is a horizontal, meat-on-metal, shoot ‘em up (shmup) that is in active development for JAMMA compatible arcade cabinets. Strong influences on the game include Id Software’s Doom, Nazca’s Metal Slug, Namco’s Splatterhouse, James Cameron’s The Terminator and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In this game, a lone pilot in a one of a kind airplane battles humans, animals, and machines infected by a plague-like disease emitted from a star. The goal of the pilot is to survive waves of enemies by “bursting” them open in spectacularly gory fashion with a brutal yet practical arsenal of weapons – machine gun, shotgun and katana blade. In order to progress the storyline, the pilot must remain untouched by enemy objects. The game ends either by the death of the pilot or destroying the source of the infection. Score is not kept; however, a number of kills is recorded.
The game has already enjoyed a location test at a bar+arcade in Indianpolis (pictured below) and it will be making an appearance at the upcoming Midwest Gaming Classic and Louisville Arcade Expo. The developers will be making “maybe less than a few dozen” dedicated cabinets with kits to follow. To keep it in appropriate resolution to the likely CRT monitors that the game would be installed into, it will run at 240i240p. While the prototype cab has six buttons, the game only uses three (mini-gun, shotgun, katana); the scoring is based on a kill counter as opposed to the traditional ### points per enemy and so on. Here is some media to enjoy:
Here is a video, as a disclaimer, it is a bloody/violent game so you’ve been warned just in case:
Should be interesting to see how this all pans out. What are your thoughts on this, would you like to see this at an arcade near you?
Looks awsome but it will never come to any location near me as arcade operators tend to stick with driving or shooting games. I miss seeing these types of games with joystick and buttons. If they made the game more affordable however and charge 20p and not somone like 50p or a £1 then I think people would probably play it.
That is what we will have to wait and see on – if the kit is reasonably priced then I imagine that there are some JAMMA cabs still hanging out there somewhere not far from you which need a refresh.
We are targeting a price point for the JAMMA PCB that is designed for the home collector. Hopefully we can get it to be less than a few hundred dollars. It’s definitely a goal to make this game accessible to collectors who are in a similar situation to you!
That’s good and all if you collect but what about in public arcades? I’d love to give this a try but it seems operators might shun this believing the game can be played at home when it’s not that possible. Last time I saw a joystick game was tekkan 6 and street fighter 4 import and they were still played on even though the game was out for the consoles. I miss seeing joystick games in the arcades.
Well hopefully I can get my hands on a pcb when it´s released 🙂
Will this game be for sale in the modern arcade industry?
Should that be 240p resolution as opposed to 240i?
Yeah, you’re correct! It’s CGA, 320×240, 240p. As you might imagine, it looks infinitely better on a native CGA arcade CRT than it does on a modern computer screen.
I think this looks pretty cool, but the scoring seems a bit too straight forward with it being solely a kill count. Score gimmicks can inspire more skilled gameplay, but I could see how potentially they hinder a freedom the game devs might want the player to have in dispatching enemies.
The scoring system, along with the rest of the game are still in pre-alpha development stages. The scoring system is something we are holding out on until we have a feel for balance, difficulty and functionality of the game.
The KILL only scoring system is something we are getting A LOT of feedback on, but the final system will be more complex and reward the play for style/skill.
Thanks for the info. I’m looking forward to what you guys come up with. Sounds like this process of game development might naturally fork off into different “game modes” which could offer different play styles and scoring systems. However it comes out I would love see this in my local arcade someday.
It would be great if we saw a resurgence in CRT arcade monitors. Especially for certain games.
I’d have to say I agree with you. There however is a real problem regarding the crt situation and I’d like to think if the hardware is good enough, maybe it should be time developers learn to run a 480p mode where they can use scanlines and the necessary crt filters in place for non-crt operators. They really should have been doing this for awhile now in regards to all things retro gaming.
Brilliant! We are also planning to do an Arcade Release fro VORTEX ATTACK. But only for PC-WINDOWS based machines…We know it’s not the “real thing” but, we don’t mind.
More info clicking in our website!