Zero Wing (Genesis/Mega Drive)

“All your base are belong to us.” It’s a phrase that has echoed around online since the internet started making its way into people’s homes, even becoming one of the first recognizable internet memes before people knew what that term meant. “Someone set up us the bomb”, “What happen”, “For great justice”, many phrases from the poorly translated opening of Zero Wing on the Mega Drive have tickled people ever since the world wide web helped them find the unintentionally funny opening. However, while people enjoy repeating the strange lines, few seem to think much about what the horizontally scrolling space shooter it was attached to must be like. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual content of Zero Wing is far less memorable than the strange and now beloved opening.

 

What Zero Wing’s opening is attempting to say between the poorly translated Japanese isn’t really all that complex. In the distant future, a cyborg named CATS has seized Japan’s space colonies, these being the bases that now belong to him. While CATS sends out a message taunting the spacecraft lead by a man named Trent, what it ends up causing is a last desperate bid to take the colonies back, Trent deploying every ZIG on board. While the intro uses the name ZIG initially with no explanation, it’s not hard to infer correctly that this is the name for the fighter craft Trent will be piloting through enemy territory. After that legendary introduction there’s almost no other story elements to be found, this horizontal sci-fi shoot ’em up not really needing a plot at all considering you just travel from one location to the next and fight bosses with no character. It was definitely the right choice to include that opening cutscene to set the stage though, and while it wouldn’t have stuck with anyone had it been properly adapted for English, it has proven so influential it has even influenced the original arcade version. When Bitwave Games rereleased the arcade version of Zero Wing that lacked an introduction of any kind, they ended up updating the game to appeal to the meme-loving fans, mostly correcting the English save for certain unforgettable lines like “All your base are belong to us” and “For great justice”.

To achieve that great justice, you’ll be using the ZIG, a capable little spacecraft that is mostly defined by its weapons fire and its tractor beam. The standard weapons are definitely the more important feature and far more functional. By destroying transporter crafts, you’ll find weapon pick-ups that can give you one of three shot types. The red Vulcan Shot focuses on spreading out the damage, multiple shots firing in front of you from various angles to help cover the screen ahead. The damage output isn’t as strong as the blue Laser though, the lasers firing in a more focused forward-facing manner that means things directly in your path are going to feel the heat but you aren’t covering every angle in a game where enemies can appear from up high or below quite often. The green Homing Missiles are definitely the best for hitting foes though, able to track the opposition fairly well and dish out damage even to enemies who are sneakily nestled behind barriers, but it doesn’t pack the same punch as the other two weapon options. You can swap between the weapons by picking them up whenever you find them, but investing in a power long-term by grabbing duplicates will upgrade the weapon to serve its purpose better. It’s quite likely you will gravitate towards the more flexible green and red attacks, but the laser is a good fit for boss fights in particular and since deaths do set you back a fair bit, you can try to pick your weapons for the stage as you learn what might help you best.

 

The tractor beam, unfortunately, is a neat idea with almost no room to really do its job. The tractor beam extends out a pitiful distance from your ZIG, requiring you to be fairly close to actually suck up eligible objects into it. The bright side of it is any enemy craft or object that fits in the beam will immediately be rendered harmless to you so you can sometimes scoop up a baddie instead of shooting it down, but that also requires getting in close to enemies who might be firing their small pellet shots at you so it’s usually not a great idea to be so close. Even if you do brave the danger and snag them, the game wants you to think you’ve got a powerful new tool for dealing heavy damage but puts in too many barriers to using it well. Launching a captured object out of your beam can deal a good chunk of damage, but that launched attack will impact with the first thing of decent substance. This will probably be a tiny enemy who is swarming you or just a very basic attack from a boss, bosses feeling like it could have been where this mechanic was specifically catered to but rarely does the game do so. Even with bosses who bring in objects your beam can steal and fire back it’s going to be very hard to find a successful window to launch it without it being a waste, and even when you do, it doesn’t feel like it does much to speed up the fight. It almost feels smarter to never press the button assigned to the beam to avoid being tempted into an unrewarding and dangerous situation, but you can sometimes find bombs that you can carry around freely and are launched from the tractor beam. They’re fairly strong as well, but you can also try to carry them for a while and possibly unlock a secret fourth upgrade for your weapons should you play well enough to avoid the power resets on death.

The ZIG will get two “options” when you grab your weapons, little support crafts that float above and below your spaceship and fire the same weapon as you, and they can be used to nudge enemies for considerable damage. The last pick-up of note though are the speed boosts, which at first are definitely a boon in a game that likes to scatter fast moving attacks so you have to eye your spot of safety quickly and zip into it. Zero Wing is not nearly a bullet hell, but the speed is a great aid until it can instead start becoming your enemy. A great deal of Zero Wing’s level space introduces terrain you need to be careful about bumping into. Not only is any single enemy attack dangerous on contact, but just touching a wall or ceiling blows your ZIG up instantly, and the game has no qualms about making small gaps and tights halls for you to contend with as your forward momentum is determined by the screen scroll. Trying to nudge your ZIG around such cramped quarters can occasionally feel like the bigger danger, the player sometimes needing to ever so gently press a direction with the margin for error variable based on how much speed you’ve accrued. Dodging enemy attacks can also become harder if you are too zippy for your own good, it harder to thread that needle when necessary. While this sounds like it might mean you need to strategically feel out your speed levels to avoid such issues, it mostly just feels like the controller isn’t sensitive enough to read small motions once you get too fast, meaning at some point it might have been wiser just to cap the speed.

 

While Zero Wing’s levels are defined pretty heavily by their embrace of level geometry requiring tight flying to avoid fatal bumps, it does whip up some fairly decent and varied foes and ones that put that weapon system to the test. The game is happy to use the environment to block off foes to try and get you to dip into the more reliable homing and spread shots only to throw something like a huge walking weapons platform with plenty of turrets on it that you want gone ASAP but might lack the firepower to shred quickly if you went with weaker attack options. The Barricade Zone stage features bugs who bite through barriers to carve you paths, the player needing to manage how close they’re willing to get to these helpful but still fatal to the touch creatures, but just as many stages throw out little spacecraft that shoot out slightly different shot spreads to weave through that fail to leave an impression. Enemy homing missiles are particularly rough to deal with depending on your speed and situation and thankfully they’re rare for it, but stages also usually feature a miniboss or two on top of the bulkier boss at the end to make for some more interesting fights. Even the final boss can just feel like a pile of weapons though, some earlier foes like a humanoid mech and a giant alien face a little closer to something visually interesting, but it’s battles like Rellon’s final foe who throws spiked balls all around the arena that almost approached giving your tractor beam something to do to spice up the fight only for regular weapons to end up being what actually works. Levels are pretty quick to clear if you know what you’re doing though, often broken up well enough between the boss battles and enemy interludes to make this an effective enough space shooter.

THE VERDICT: Once you’re done chuckling at the strange translation of its intro, Zero Wing provides a fairly decent space shooter but one that doesn’t realize all of its ideas cleanly. A bit too much focus is put on weaving through tight spaces when your control isn’t as clean as it could be, and the tractor beam feels like a flop because calling it situational would be overly generous. The weapon system does its job in keeping things interesting though and the game is quick to move through enemy types and boss encounters to keep things lively and varied even if it’s not always shaking things up too much with the way your foes are designed.

 

And so, I give Zero Wing for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

An OKAY rating. The unusual banter between CATS and Trent that kicks off Zero Wing is its claim to fame and the only thing that really helps it avoid blending in with the shoot ’em up crowd. It does make some smart choices, the weapon system works well for providing tools you enjoy using while making it pretty clear what their perks are should you want to vary them up. The stages do diversify the opposition and design, Rellos leaning into an organic environment full of bugs, Pleades makes its base’s halls different with its asteroid filled background, and Aquese is a watery world before you plunge into the Submarine Tunnel. Each place brings in some new looking dangers and some do pack a different punch or are placed deviously, even a fully upgraded homing missile not exempting you from needing to weave through danger. The tight spaces do feel rather oppressive and your power or speed level can sometimes feel not up to snuff or conversely overtuned, so a bit more space to operate would help to alleviate the controller’s limited ability to let you move. At present, the annoying need to nudge your ZIG around instead of fluidly flying it holds things back a touch, and some greater ambition would help Zero Wing’s big encounters or more interesting situations stand out. The tractor beam feels like it needs a complete overhaul, it a potential key to making encounters more exciting or layered rather than just another case of laying down rapid fire.

 

One thing Zero Wing is a superb example of though is what wonderful things can be hiding in games that got very little attention. The internet opening up the chance to share strange experiences with others meant the oddness of that opening cutscene reached millions of people. Instead of falling through the cracks that many moderately effective shmups end up in, it instead is referenced across countless video games and has even come out of the mouth of politicians. Cheeky referential humor may draw someone to Zero Wing, but once they’ve had their laugh, if they do want to stick around for the shoot ’em up, they’ll find something that has a few interesting moments too.