Vulgus (Arcade)

Capcom is without a doubt one of the biggest parts of video game history. Creating cornerstone franchises like Mega Man, revolutionizing entire genres with series like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, and even creating the template which almost every fighting game is built off of with Street Fighter II. For a company with such an incredible tenure it’s a bit jarring to look back at the first video game they ever made, their 1984 shoot ’em up release Vulgus how they got their start with the medium. While space shooters were the norm at the time and many other companies were making them, the clear inspiration Vulgus takes from games like Namco’s Xevious without really adding anything groundbreaking to the formula certainly doesn’t show the promising future this game company held.

Vulgus is a vertically scrolling shoot ’em up where you control a small spacecraft as it travels between planets to fight the alien insects of Vulgus. There are three planets you’ll be looping between during the battle, the action starting on a crater-filled world perhaps closer to a moon than a planet before you head off through space to fight above a green mountainous planet and finally an ice world. The sections in planetary airspace tend to have the greater amount of enemies who fly in from the sides and above to pester you with rather tiny orange shots, their movement and when they fire making them hard to avoid until you’ve developed a deep understanding of the game through repeated deaths. However, when you head into space to move between planets, things do calm down a bit as enemies come in clearer arrangements and distinct packs so you have a better chance of responding to them or predicting their movement.

Space isn’t necessarily a safer place always, as the final trip between the ice world and back to the crater-filled starting area involves you fighting what might be considered a boss. Appearing almost like a small planetoid itself, the cracked red orb orbited by smaller versions of itself isn’t too challenging and is probably outdone by the little baddies that pester you during the fight since they have that erratic and quick movement that makes many enemies a pain in Vulgus. Your regular laser shots do take out any small enemy the moment they make contact at least, although since they fire in a straight line you need to move yourself properly to line up the shots and your spacecraft is not particularly agile in a game where your opposition isn’t afraid to buzz around like the insects they’re based on.

The large enemies you encounter have movement styles that are much easier to track to make up for how they take more shots to kill, but your alternate fire option can put an end to them immediately. Your bombs fire forward like missiles and will tear through anything in their path, both good for clearing crowded enemies or ripping through a tougher foe with one shot. You have a limited supply though, but “Pow” icons can appear that you collect to replenish your bomb stock. Notably, the “Pow” icon, as well as a pinwheel-like enemy that would eventually be known as the Yashichi, have appeared in many Capcom titles since, although the Yashichi here is just an additional enemy type amidst the horde rather than anything special. In fact, whether or not an enemy fits in with the idea these are mutated bugs is practically a coin flip. Some large enemies might as well be giant flies or moths, but many little ones just look like generic space ships or even simple shapes. There are some with bug-like elements like their wing shape and a few that even have six visible legs on them despite having other features that make what they even are a little less clear. Regardless of whether they’re designed to be an insect or spaceship, each one has a distinct approach to flying in and firing even if it may be to be erratic and hard to predict.

One of the more interesting aspects of Vulgus outside of its historical legacy though would be a set of pick-ups that appear occasionally after an enemy is shot down. Small circles with an uppercase letter in them will appear from time to time, but what these do when grabbed seems to be up for debate. Capcom itself has said before that these items will reduce the aggression of the alien forces in various ways, such as making them appear less, fire less, or move slower. On the other hand, many players online seem to be under the impression these pick-ups do the exact opposite, instead making the enemies tougher. The letter “S” is the one that influences speed, “E” will impact how varied enemies are, and “D” influences how often foes fire those tiny orange bullets. One thing that is definitely true about these pick-ups is that if you collect all three letters in one life then a large 10,000 point item will appear, the player able to earn an extra life at certain score thresholds. This could mean that the game does get harder when you grab the letters as a way of making this point item harder to obtain, but since the game never directly explains the purpose of the letters it also feels strange that they’d have a negative impact when that goes against the grain of typical game design of the time. Whatever the true purpose of these letters are, the fact that sources seem unable to agree on their influence perhaps shows how little impact they have on proceedings, especially since the game has a natural difficulty curve as you get deeper in so it could be easy to misreport that items are having no clear influence or a detrimental one. (EDIT: Mark at Retro Ports has dug into the code and found it’s actually failing to collect the pick-ups that causes them to influence the difficulty and S doesn’t work at all!)

Despite that little mystery though, most of Vulgus is actually rather bland even when it’s being a bit ruthless in throwing space bugs at you. Difficulty seems to be the draw here as you try to get deeper and deeper in each time to see that pseudo-final boss or earn a high score, but you’re not being asked to be particularly adept at anything besides remembering how the bugs moved last time around. You fire and you weave through incoming attacks as best you can, and if enemies so kindly line up in a column or are one of the bigger baddies you blast a missile through them and go back to continued laser fire. I’m not too warm towards Xevious myself but that at least had you fly above more interesting places and fight both aerial and ground-based foes at the same time, the balancing of which is much better than Vulgus rarely whipping out its bomb targets while also allowing those same targets to go down to a brief salvo of lasers if you’re feeling too lazy to press a second button.

THE VERDICT: Vulgus is an underwhelming first effort from the legendary game developer Capcom. Its erratic enemy movement and crowded screens make for a degree of difficulty that isn’t too great to engage with, and despite having two attack options, your bombs have so many clearly prescribed targets that they’re hardly interesting to utilize. The letter pick-ups are practically a non-factor no matter what you believe their impact is meant to be, but the basic shooting is at least not so brutal or bland that it will completely put you off. Vulgus may be rough to play if you want to see how Capcom got into the video game industry, but you won’t be pulling your hair out over it despite the less than stellar way it tries to make the alien threat dangerous.

And so, I give Vulgus for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. While its name was likely picked because of how it sounds rather than its meaning, Vulgus does come from the Latin word for common folk, and Vulgus the game does feel a bit like a rather plain shoot ’em up. You move upwards, fire at what comes down to kill you, and repeat that until you’re out of lives. It blends in with similar arcade ilk and would not likely be talked about much if it didn’t have the honor of being Capcom’s first video game creation. It did attempt a few things to make itself less painfully generic, but the bombs don’t break up the gameplay well when they’re so clearly defined for one purpose and useless against the wildly moving regular aliens. The letter power-ups being such a mystery that people can’t actually naturally determine their function removes one of the ways you could have varied gameplay. Rather than diving in to grab those letters though you’ll probably give them a wide berth since the game is already hard enough without increasing the difficulty deliberately and if they do weaken foes, it’s not by a significant enough degree to really risk that potentially lethal dive to grab the item.

Besides the gradual introduction of new enemies and the space segments having a different pace to them, Vulgus is mostly just very plain when it’s not being a bit too rough with the player. You might be able to see a bit of connective tissue between Vulgus and future Capcom titles like the bug blasting of Exed Exes or the popular vertically scrolling shoot ’em ups of the 1942 series, but beyond seeing the birthplace of the “Pow” symbol and the Yashichi, this feels like less a part of a company history lesson and more just the game that was technically first out of the gate. For someone who has no idea of its significance, Vulgus is just going to feel like a rough space shooter that doesn’t stand the test of time.