Assault Suits Gynoug: Der Advanced Busterhawk Aniki - Talking About Masaya

[Yimothy]

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Masaya was the gaming arm of Nippon Computer Systems Corporation (NCS), though the brand is now owned by someone else. Honestly I don't know much about them except that I've found myself playing quite a few of their games lately - the recent Switch port of Advanced Busterhawk Gley Lancer, Warsong (aka Langrisser), and now Gynoug (aka Wings of Wor), from whose boot sequence I took the above Masaya logo. It's a nice logo. Cool pegasus. Masaya seem to have mostly made shooters and strategy games. They also made the Assault Suits series, including the Leynos and Valken subseries, the first games of which were localised as Target Earth on genesis and Cybernator on SNES respectively.

As mentioned, I'm currently playing Gynoug for mega drive. In the US it was released as Wings of Wor, but my copy is PAL. It's a horizontal shmup whose gameplay so far seems pretty standard for the genre - you fly around, shoot a lot of enemies, pick up various powerups, die in one hit, and so on. There are two basic power-ups, red and blue orbs. The blue ones increase the number of shots you fire, the red ones increase the spread of the shots. When you die your power level goes down one notch in each of these. Then there are a set of fancier orbs which change the direction of fire - spreading forwards in a cone, split between forwards and backwards, or a group of parallel shots above and below your character going straight forwards. In addition you get magic scrolls, of which you can stock three. These are activated with one button and then used (if applicable) with another, which took me a little while to figure out. Some of them are more passive, like a temporary shield that comes up when you activate it and eventually fades away, and others are extra shots, like lightning bolts that come forwards or balls that shoot out diagonally in four directions. Those are equipped when you activate them and fired when you hit the other button.

The game seems pretty doable for an incompetent shmupper like me - I've reached stage three of six on a single credit so far after only a few play sessions, there's an option in the menu to increase the number of lives, and I think there's an infinite continues cheat, so perhaps I'll see the end someday. If I can't, there's the option of the upcoming switch (and other current consoles) port, due for release in a week or so. Presumably it will be similar to the recent Gley Lancer port, which featured save states, rewind, and a heap of graphical filters.

The thing that seems most notable about Gynoug is the theme and graphical style - instead of a spaceship you play a little winged man. The enemies, according to the manual, are mutants. Some of them are pretty odd, like the floating faces in the screenshot above. Is that supposed to be a Star of David? (Edit: I’m realising now it’s a guy with a beard and pointy hat lying on his front facing out of the screen. The upper left and right points of the star are his legs and the lower ones his arms, and the pink bit by his chin are the hands).

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The image that comes to my mind thinking of Gynoug though is this man-train. What is going on here? Anyway, it turns out to be a pretty easy boss, as befits stage one. Park yourself in his face, hold down fire, and it dies before even getting a shot off. The stage two boss, which puts up a bit more of a challenge, is a sunken ship with two oversized human faces. It's an interesting aesthetic.

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One other incidental thing: in the first stage there are a few sections where the cave you're flying through starts tilting, I guess to represent an earthquake or something. It's a neat effect. The emulator I took the above screenshot in renders it correctly, but on my Mega SG where I've been playing this the leftmost column of tiles is distorted. This also happens on my actual Mega Drive, though I think it looks a little different there to on the SG. Apparently on MD2s it doesn't distort, which I find interesting just because this game came out a couple of years before the MD2, so at time of release it would have looked wonky.

 

[Peklo]

Gynoug's CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE A TERRIFIC GUY clear screen is one of the best endings in video games.

I'm glad Ratalaika's bringing the game back as it sure feels a little underplayed next to all the hoary old Cho Aniki memery and mech-head attention that Assault Suits garners from their catalogue. Even so, that spirit of cheeky iconography is certainly present in Gynoug too, like with the late-game boss with the screen-length erect penis.

Last year, Korone went twelve hours streaming the game in a valiant effort, so there's that too.

 

[Becksworth]

I haven't played it yet, but Gynoug looks like the Gradius to Cho Aniki's Parodius.

 

[MetManMas]

I checked out a longplay shortly after Peklo's write-up and found the horrible penis boss out of curiosity. It's actually pretty horrifying! Some ugly, shriveled gray monster man that's all bloody with entrails showing, and the horrible penis serves as the base this monstrosity is attached to.

 

[Yimothy]

Turns out I’m pretty bad at Gynoug, despite initial impressions. I’ve been struggling to clear stage 2 consistently. I’m fact I’m tending to lose several lives right at the start of the level to some bird enemies that shouldn’t be that tough. I have a remarkable ability to move straight into enemy bullets that would have missed me by a mile if I’d just stayed where I was. I reached level three again by increasing the number of lives in the options menu, which also made me realise I’ve been playing on easy. Which I don’t mind doing, to be honest.

Level three is kind of a thematic shift from the first two, which take place in natural environments - a cave and at sea. Three is indoors, I guess in a mansion. A high proportion of enemies are statues. There are also coffins that open to drop mudmen, and swords that fall diagonally from the sky. The midboss is a giant worm that moves itself directly at you. So far I haven’t figured out a way to beat it safely because of how quickly it moves. Sometimes dodging seems impossible. The stage boss, which I haven’t gotten past yet, is another giant face, this time I think in a wall. It extends like a furnace or something to throw fire at you.

 

[Dracula]

The weird little star-of-david men also kinda remind me of the mythological buer:

They pop up in video games from time to time as well. But it might just be a coincidence.

But yeah I've always seen Gynoug as sort of a Chou Aniki dry run. I don't know if Masaya was mostly a publisher or if they had their own in-house developers, but the art direction between those two series has got to be from the same people, right?

Anyway I've owned a copy of this game for many years, and I had a similar experience with it, where I cleared the first several stages with seeming ease but on later plays it somehow seemed more difficult.

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve set my console to NTSC, so the game is running a bit faster for me now. I’m not sure I can tell the difference all that well, but I’m getting less fatigued with the length of the stages now. I’ve also started using cheats: if you hold A, C, and left on the game over screen then you don’t lose a credit when you continue, which is handy. You can also access a level select by holding A while highlighting “control” in the options menu. I know there’s something satisfying about cruising through the early stages of a shmup once you’ve got them down, but I’m also happy to just work on whatever part of the game I’m up to. For now, that’s stage three. I can reach the end pretty consistently now, but I haven’t beat the boss.

The tricky bits in the stage are where it scrolls diagonally while enemies shoot long lines of fire across the screen (if I’m not careful the scrolling takes me directly into the fire), a couple of enemies about three quarters of the way through who throw bullets up into the air that go offscreen and slowly come back down at you seemingly out of nowhere, the midboss (though I’m beating it pretty consistently now - just stay across the screen from it and be ready to dodge perpendicular to its movement), and remembering not to pick up the red weapon once I have the blue one. There are these falling sword enemies that come at you diagonally. The blue weapon surrounds you with your own fire, and you’re pretty much safe from swords. The red weapon only goes forwards, so you have to dodge instead.

The boss has a pretty small weak point. It doesn’t move, at least in the time I’ve managed to survive facing it, but all the shots it puts out forces you to move and makes it hard to get close, so it’s hard to maintain a position where I can hit it. I guess I’ll get there eventually.

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve managed to reach level four. I’m now fully just using the level select code to get to whichever stage I’ve reached before and the infinite continues code to stay there. So far the game seems pretty forgiving of this - it’s not super hard to get fully powered up starting from scratch in any of the stages so far.

Stage 4 has a sort of industrial thing going on. Lots of metalwork. My favourite enemy type in the stage is the little guy at the lower right of this image. He’s working a pump connected to the machine next to him that’s throwing bombs into the air (there’s one just coming out, another at the top middle, and one falling on the left). I’ve also got the lightning bolt magic active, giving me the little angel at the top of the screen who can shoot lightning down. It’s not that useful because it only covers the centre of the screen. If you collect a few tokens before activating it you get a wider bolt, but there’s only one that I’ve found in this stage.

A much better magic that appears for the first time in this stage is elemental, which you get from magic pages with an O on them - options! Two of them, circling you and firing lightning bolts straight ahead. These are extremely useful, especially because unlike regular shots they go through walls and there are a lot of enemies in the latter part of the stage that are hidden behind walls making them hard to hit. The problem with them is that after absorbing ten hits they disappear, and it’s quite hard to keep them from taking hits. Also visible in the above shot is a different frame of the bomb machine guy’s animation cycle.

The start of the stage features a trip through some tight tunnels with few enemies but a lot of power-ups (mainly hidden, but if you hold attack you’re bound to find them) including two one-ups, the first I’ve seen since a single one back in stage 1. The scrolling is quite fast and at first I found it a bit hard to distinguish background and foreground and identify the safe path, but it’s straightforward after a few attempts.

Here’s the midboss. Half of it, anyway. There are I think four or six floating heads that accompany this plane (?), but somehow they aren’t in my shot. Maybe I paused in a frame in which they were flashing? I was distracted when I took the picture by the enemy bullet that’s right about to hit my guy (I managed to dodge it by holding back on the controller when I unpaused, though - hit detection seems pretty precise in this game). This thing puts out a lot of bullets - I’m doing well if I get past with only one life lost. It doesn’t take a lot of hits to kill it, but it will only take damage when the plane is hit from above or below. The propellers and the not-in-my-screenshot floating heads don’t seem to take damage, only block hits.

And here’s the stage boss. I thought at first this was the penis boss mentioned upthread, but I think that’s its spinal column. Gross. A bit like the midboss, you have to hit this guy in the right place to hurt it. In this case it’s the heart you have to hit, which is floating around seperate from the body (behind the P in pause in my shot, in the process of moving back away from me and into cover). The bullets it fires look different from most so far in the game. I think they’re supposed to be red blood cells. So far I have not made it past this guy, tending to lose quite a few lives and with them my power levels in the latter part of the stage.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that the plot of this game is you’re on a planet where winged people live and it’s being taken over by mutants. Apparently this is a creation of the localisers and the original story is that demons are invading the heavens and you’re an angel out to stop them. That makes a lot of sense to me.

 

[Yimothy]

After a few days off from the game I came back to it and beat stage four on my first try (having used the level select cheat to skip this first three stages). I think there were two main elements to my success: using the magic attacks more intelligently than before, and accidentally leaving the console in PAL mode so everything was a little bit slower.

I’ve been playing with the console set to NTSC because the game just doesn’t feel right at 50 Hz. The stages go on too long, you move really slowly without speed ups, it’s just less fun. But, having learned most of level four at 60hz, it was much easier going a little slower.

As for the magic, I’d been using the option powerup’s piercing attack to take out enemies on the ground behind walls. This time, I got past the midboss without dying and so still had a heap of ground attack magic from the first half of the level. That attack runs along the ground, up and down walls, and was ideal for taking out the enemies in the back half. Pretty obvious, in retrospect. Anyway, that left me with the option magic still in stock when I reached the boss. I used it, intending that it would shield me from enemy bullets, and found that the boss went down in seconds. Only then did I realise that the piercing nature of the options’ fire meant I could hit the enemy’s weak spot even when it was behind cover. This is probably something you’re expected to get a lot quicker than I got it.

Stage 5 seems to take place inside some kind of creature:

Judging by the villi we are maybe in its gut, though I’d guess this is supposed to be the bloodstream. The upper and lower walls move up and down in this stage. Maybe it is the gut after all. At first I found it a bit hard to distinguish the back- and foregrounds from the action in the middle plane, but it didn’t take long to get used to.

Here’s the midboss. A nude dude. I’ve only reached it once so far, not much to say about it yet.

 

[Yimothy]

After about a month and a half spent making a fan translation, I’m getting back to Gynoug. After all that time with a different shooter, one which is faster, shorter, and more forgiving, it took me a while to get used to it again. However, I have finally reached:

the late-game boss with the screen-length erect penis.

I’m putting the screenshot in a spoiler because of nudity:

Spoiler

Man, stage five is long. And pretty hard. I’ve got the first half pretty much down now, I can usually get past the midboss without having lost a life, but the second half gets very intense. If I let more than a few enemies get on screen at once then they put out enough fire that I just have to concentrate on dodging and can’t keep the enemy count under control. I’m still enjoying Gynoug, but I am considering switching to playing on a platform that allows save states. Dunno. I am still making progress, if I keep at it I’ll probably get there eventually. For now, though:

Spoiler

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve made the change from console to emulator, and beat stage five using save states. Not that many of them: one before the midboss, one after, and one before the stage boss. I only reloaded a few times. Why am I trying to justify myself? The game got too hard, it was quit or cheat, I went with the latter. Probably would have beat the stage eventually, but I was finding myself reluctant to play the game legit. Plus I’m already using the level select to beat stages I’ve already done.

Anyways, stage six is a boss rush so far. You face all the midbosses, then the stage four boss. I haven’t got past that one yet. Between bosses you get a bunch of power ups. Very easy to take too many speed ups and wind up hard to control from them. The stage itself is quite pretty - you’re in the clouds, with multiple layers of parallax above and below. The foreground layers move in a different direction to the background ones, which gives kind of a rotation effect. It looks quite good, even if having the enemy go out of sight behind clouds at the top and bottom of the screen is not ideal for my survival.

 

[Yimothy]

Just in case anyone was hanging out for the conclusion of my time with Gynoug, I finished it shortly after the previous post. The last level brings back all the mid bosses, plus the end boss of stage four. It’s up in the clouds, maybe they ascended to the afterlife when I beat them earlier? Anyways, the last boss is a kind if curled up figure that releases a heap of white spheres that follow you around. To hit it you have to shoot through a little gap at the front of it. The spheres move pretty slowly, and I found it had a sort of peaceful feel to play, but it was still fairly tough. Thank goodness for my save state before the start of the fight, I guess.