Truxton on Sega Genesis / Mega Drive

The 16 bit revolution was a pretty amazing time for shooters in the video game world. Prior to this time, home systems weren't terribly capable of handling the graphics necessary for a shooter to actually be good and this is why you don't hear many people talking about the amazing shooters on NES. Genesis and later SNES (to a lessor degree as they didn't focus on this genre near as heavily) would introduce us to a world of shooters that we never could have imagined outside of an arcade before.

Truxton was one of the better shooters for the Genesis, although it wasn't without its flaws that made you throw controllers across the room every now and then.

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Truxton wasn't all that different from other shooters and the annoying omnipresent side bar was annoying but overall it was a very entertaining game with an interesting weapon system. It was vertical all the time and this is the reason for the side bar since at the time most arcade games used a different type of screen to accommodate larger vertical screens than horizontal.

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It started out like all games of this type started out back in the day, with a pea shooter for a main weapon initially that you quickly powered up and it got to be much more powerful. It is very important to not return to your pea shooter state by foolishly dying because the game is much more difficult when you don't have much firepower.

Of course the game realizes this and if you are fully powered down they throw powerups at you in much greater quantity should you find yourself back at the basic weapon.

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One of the main things that was either awesome or annoying depending on how you look at it is that you could change from one weapon type to another by picking up a certain things that would appear but it would keep the power level (indicated by P) the same regardless of which one you used. You had the standard red spread shot, the blue homing laser that was a bit weaker but you didn't have to aim and the green laser which was more powerful but would only fire straight ahead. There were different areas where each of these things were preferable.

This was one drawback to the game in my opinion because unlike other games like Thunder Force, you couldn't switch between the weapon types at will, instead you had to wait for the option to pop up on the screen by some sort of carrier pod that would travel your way. Sometimes you would pick them up by accident and change your weapon type unwillingly.

The game was an early type of "bullet hell" but not anywhere near as crazy as some of the modern day bullet hell games such as Ikaruga which is just ridiculous in my opinion.

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There are only 5 levels and as you would expect, each of them has a boss. This was a bit disappointing because as shooters go, it was quite short. Whatever, I found it entertaining and thought it had great replay value because your ability to make it though this game was based a lot upon level memorization and back then I had the patience necessary to do something like that.

You can download the ROM for Truxton for free here