Gaiares

Gaiares

Japanese Mega Drive box art
Developer(s) Telenet Japan
Publisher(s) Renovation
Designer(s) Kōji Yokota
Masayasu Yamamoto
Composer(s) Shinobu Ogawa
Minoru Yuasa
Platform(s) Sega Genesis
Release date(s)
  • JP December 26, 1990
  • NA 1990
Genre(s) Scrolling shooter
Mode(s) Single-player

Gaiares (ガイアレス Gaiaresu) is a 1990 scrolling shooter video game developed by Telenet Japan and published by Renovation for the Sega Genesis. The game was released in North America in 1990 and in Japan on December 26, 1990. Gaiares was released at a time when the shoot 'em up genre was immensely popular in the gaming industry; competition was fierce with franchised games like Thunder Force II, R-Type and Gradius, so the developers had to distinguish the game with a unique weapon system. The name is supposedly a combination of Gaia (mother Earth) and a shortened form/abbreviation of the word "rescue" (Res), which is the main objective of the battle taking place within the storyline.

Gameplay

Most horizontal shooters require the player's ship to come in contact with a capsule to gain weapons. Gaiares design was different, and features one of the most original and unique weapon power-up systems in the shooters genre to date. The TOZ System device can be fired out like the R-Type's Force, except each time it comes in contact with an enemy, it would inherit and learn its weapon; the player can steal from the same enemy repeatedly until the weapon's strength is maxed-out. There are 18 weapons in total to be captured, and the appearance of each weapon varies depending on the strength meter.

Many of the stage designs were heavily influenced by Macross, Gradius, and Valis, though some deviation is apparent with bosses like Death Ghetto and Mermaid. Gaiares makes extensive use of parallax, wave and warping effects across all eight stages, and the bosses are mostly screen-sized, making it one of the 16-bit platform's premiere shooters. It was one of the first 8Mb cartridge games on the Sega Genesis.

The game is notorious for its high difficulty level.

Levels

Plot

In the year 3000 the Earth has become a toxic dump ravaged by careless humans, leaving an uninhabitable, polluted wasteland. The space pirates Gulfer, led by the evil Queen ZZ Badnusty, plan to harvest the pollution to create weapons of mass destruction. The United Star Cluster of Leezaluth sent a warning to the Earth about their plans, stating that if they could not stop them, they would be forced to supernova Earth's sun to do so themselves; but if they succeeded, Leezaluth would use their technology to restore the Earth to its former beauty. Dan Dare (Diaz in the Japanese original), a young pilot from Earth was chosen to be the pilot of a new fighter ship to combat the Gulfer. The ship is armed with a powerful experimental weapon from Leezaluth called the TOZ System, which would be operated by Alexis, the emissary from Leezaluth.

Reception

Reception
Review scores
PublicationScore
MegaTech84%[1]
Game Informer9.25/10[2]
IGN8/10
Allgame[3]

MegaTech magazine said the game was "an excellent looking game, but by far the toughest horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up available on the Mega Drive".


References

  1. MegaTech rating, EMAP, issue 6, page 78, June 1992
  2. "Classic Reviews: Gaiares". Game Informer 12 (112): 108. August 2002. Perhaps the greatest of all horizontally scrolling 2D shooters.
  3. Allgame rating for Gaiares

External links