Cgrundertow Eco Fighters for Arcade Video Game Review

The vast majority of SHMUPs - especially early SHMUPs - need only two controls: move and shoot. And maybe fire bombs. It’s simple enough to understand, but kinda made a lot of those games a bit too similar. I mean, Xevious is more or less 1942 with bombs, and Twinbee is more or less Xevious with bells. So when I started to play Eco Fighters, a 1994 arcade offering by Capcom, I wasn’t expecting a huge paradigm shift. But there it was. In the form of a manipulator arm, with rotation controlled either by the L2 and R2 buttons (a crappy way to go about it), the square and circle buttons (even crappier), or the right analog stick (really effective). And the cloying mid-nineties environmental concern is an added bit of flavor! From the era that gave us Ecco the Dolphin and Captain Planet and any number of other franchises designed to guilt kids into respecting the environment - until about a decade and a half later, when the economy is so hosed that no one can be paid to bother - comes an innovative take on the SHMUP, right when the SHMUP really wanted for some decent innovation. In this case, it’s the power of multidirectional aiming, along with the use of four different modular attachments, capable of melee combat, standard fire, and charged shots. There’s the standard arm that fires giant orange shots of doom, a lightsaber-esque beam sword, a cutting blade that can fire whirly spinny homing shots, and this huge black bludgeon that can charge up into an even bigger bludgeon. That’s exactly what SHMUPs need. Bludgeons. Makes me want to dig out R-Type Final again. While recycling something. That might come close to recreating the experience. As a 1994 title, it addresses some of the issues I had with some earlier SHMUPs: the capability to effortlessly fire behind the ship, a nice change of pace with the inclusion of melee tactics... well, those were really my two primary gripes. The controls are sound if you use the right stick to aim, a method of input unavailable on the original arcade release. This is one of those few times that a port - in this case, to the PS2 on Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 - is strongly preferable to the original. You can also find it on CCC Reloaded for the PSP, though there’s no right stick on that device, so be warned. Before today, I was completely unaware of this piece of conservancy, developed by the same arcade dev team who would, in the next couple years, give us the Mega Man Power Battle series. So, to summarize: SHMUPs are fun, manipulator arms are awesome, bludgeons wreak havoc on enemy craft, plant a tree, don’t dump poison in the water main, I miss Mega Man, and Mike broke the Hubble!