Re-release this: Gun-Nac
Re-release this: Gun-Nac
Even with the Turbografx-16 and Sega Genesis out, Compile still had 8-bit magic to make.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Defunct developer Compile always had a sense of humor about them — Puyo Puyo, anyone? — but their shoot ‘em ups tended to be pretty straightforward in terms of how to perceive them. Dire threats, supercomputers, mechs, and so on. Not necessarily a gritty and dark approach, no, but you weren’t playing these games to find the humor in them like you might with some of Compile’s other work. You were there to blow stuff up, and usually that stuff was more in the “cool” camp than in the cute or funny ones.
Gun-Nac, though, was Compile deciding it was time to have some visual fun with a shoot ‘em up, to move away from their comparatively straightforward approach to enemy design and plot and do something that could instead be described as “wacky.” The basic premise is that Earth has been depleted of its resources, so humanity has spread out to the stars, building up places to live where they had to. In a far away and synthetic solar system built by humanity and lit with an artificial star, something has gone awry thanks to a wave of cosmic radiation. And now all of the inanimate objects of that synthetic system are alive while adorable little animals are turning into monster-sized nightmares, and all of it is trying to kill.
Released in 1990, Gun-Nac is a fairly late-life NES game — the system would continue to produce new games for a few more years, sure, with titles like Kirby’s Adventure nowhere near their release date yet, but by the fall of 1990, Sega’s 16-bit successor to the 8-bit Master System had already arrived in Japan, North America, Europe, Brazil, and Korea, and NEC’s Turbografx-16/PC Engine was in most of those regions as well, and had been for just as long or longer. So, when 16-bit home consoles were becoming the norm, and Compile was already developing shoot ‘em ups for those platforms — Gunhed/Blazing Lazers released for NEC’s system in 1989, while Gun-Nac’s release date preceded that of the Mega Drive’s MUSHA by just two months — it makes Gun-Nac feel pretty late life all the same.
Why an NES shoot ‘em up in 1990, then, if Compile was already making titles for more powerful hardware? Well, for one, the NES had a far larger market share at this point than either the Turbografx-16 or the Genesis. No one really owned a Mega Drive in Japan, and no one really had a Turbografx-16 in North America, situations which didn’t end up changing much over time. The Genesis would become popular, sure, and the Mega Drive thrived outside of Japan, but the system wasn’t even at the Sonic the Hedgehog stage of its existence yet, and while the PC Engine was plenty popular in Japan as the first 16-bit system with loads of popular arcade conversions and home originals already on the market, neither had the kind of base the established NES and Famicom did. Especially since Nintendo hadn’t released its own successor console yet, and wouldn’t in Japan until one month after Gun-Nac’s release, with another nine months after that for North America’s SNES launch.
And second, Compile was just damn good at making 8-bit shooters. Zanac released for the MSX and Famicom in 1986, with an NES port the next year: this game wasn’t just absolutely loaded with enemies and bullets for the time it released, but also had a system in place that procedurally generated enemies and enemy waves depending on how you were playing, how you were equipped, how long you were staying alive, and so on. That’s quite a bit to shove into an 8-bit cartridge, but Compile managed, and then followed up on that success with more 8-bit games — Aleste titles — for the Master System, as well as the shooter/action-adventure Hybrid, The Guardian Legend, for the NES.
After the PC Engine, Genesis, and SNES were all on the market, Compile made shooters for those 16-bit platforms — Blazing Lazers (Gunhed in Japan) and Seirei Senshin Spriggan for the PC Engine and PC Engine CD-ROM system, MUSHA [Aleste] for the Genesis and Robo Aleste for the Sega CD, Space Megaforce (Super Aleste outside of North America) for the SNES — but they also kept making 8-bit STGs as well. GG Aleste and GG Aleste 2 for the Game Gear, and Power Strike II for the Sega Master System in 1993. (Power Strike was the name of Aleste’s North American release; Power Strike II wasn’t Aleste 2, which released on the MSX2 computer platform exclusively in Japan, but was instead a Europe-only sequel to Power Strike, specifically, that didn’t receive official Japanese or North American releases until the Aleste Collection in 2020.)
Some of those 8-bit shooters can be a little limited for one reason or another — Power Strike II is perfectly fine in this regard as the Master System was designed for TV play, but the resolution of the portable Game Gear games are probably their most significant fault; things can get a little cramped — yet Gun-Nac isn’t noticeably held back by anything. In fact, it’s in that rare company that Recca is in, in that it feels like it’s doing more than you’d expect an NES game to be able to do. The screen is loaded with enemies, bullets, shrapnel, and power-ups basically at all times. You might as well just tape the fire button down, because other than when you’ve just defeated a boss, there is no reason to ever stop shooting. And if you do stop, you might die. It’s not quite as intense or as fast-paced as Recca, but it pushes the system in similar ways, to the point that, in the options, you have the choice of prioritizing the frame rate stabilization and avoiding slowdown, or just trying to keep the sprites from flickering like wild.
This wasn’t always the case with NES shooters. The system has plenty of good ones and quite a few great ones, but with regularity it would receive ports of arcade games that had to be scaled back in some way. The best of these would sometimes use what the NES did do well to make a better game than the one being ported, like with Capcom’s Legendary Wings, but sometimes you’d just get a more limited version of a game that was produced on more powerful hardware capable of doing more. With something built from the ground up, though, you see what the NES could have done if those ports were given more time, or if they had released a little later when the developers had — pun not intended — compiled more knowledge about how to best produce games for it.
Anyway, because of Gun-Nac’s odd premise, every stage looks pretty different, with wildly different enemies, and it’s here that much of the joy is found. The first stage focuses a lot on rabbits firing off carrot missiles at you, including a mecha bunny with massive guns attached to its side as the stage’s boss. The second stage features volcanoes and enormous candles firing bullets, as well as suitcases launching missiles (these were cigarette packs and cigarettes in the Japanese version, which made a lot more sense, but what could you do about Nintendo of America in 1990 besides sigh and make the change). You fight a giant mermaid (an ode to Konami’s Parodius, perhaps?) in a level that looks like it was ripped out of Capcom’s 1943. If 1943 wasn’t full of World War II-era fighter planes armed with sci-fi weaponry but instead focused on violent umbrellas and legions of bubble monsters and jumping octopi emerging from the deep, anyway.
While Gun-Nac is weird in a way Compile’s other shoot ‘em ups of the time were not (and plays like Compile’s other shooters do despite the visual and conceptual weirdness, kind of like how Parodius, for all its oddities, is still wrapped around a Gradius core), the kind of strangeness in story and concept did end up making its way to post-Compile projects by former Compile devs at MileStone Inc., and now RS34. Radirgy? Illmatic Envelope Swamp? Those are some weird STGs, and bless those studios for that.
As is so often the case with a Compile shooter, the strength of the game is in its weapon systems. Compile wasn’t one for basic arsenals or pickups, and instead often built elaborate systems for you to learn, and in order to survive the full onslaught of their games, you had to learn. P Chips, a Compile staple, will occasionally show up for you to collect, and these will upgrade your weapon level. Your weapon level carries over between whichever weapon you’re currently equipped with, so feel free to experiment with the five different guns, each of which is labeled with a corresponding number on its pickups. The first is a standard pea shooter that becomes a wider multi-shot, and eventually also shoots behind you, as well. The second is an orb beam that, at its most powerful, also fires a multi-shot out of what’s now a wave shot itself, behind both it and you. The third are homing shots that look like blades, the fourth is a powerful blast of fire that’s always active and shoots further when you press the fire button, and the fifth is a wide-beam laser.
Each has a drawback of some kind: the fifth weapon is very strong, but there’s a delay in how often you can fire it, the fourth can’t always pass through background objects, the third is tenacious in its chase but weak, meaning it can take forever to kill something with it, the second is a bit limited in some ways before it’s powered up and covers more ground, and the first leaves huge gaps around you until it’s powered up, or even sometimes when it’s only sort of powered up.
Every weapon is good even with the drawbacks, but not every weapon is good in every situation because of them. Since Gun-Nac doesn’t use the procedurally generated enemy system of Zanac or early Aleste titles, and your weapon level doesn’t drop when you pick up a new weapon type, you can learn through experimentation about which weapon is best in which situation.
Your weapons have power levels you can upgrade with the P Chips, but there’s another layer to this: the wing. The wing is an upgrade that looks like a bigger version of your ship, and gives you even more firepower that’s not available in your basic ship form when you pick it up. In addition, instead of losing a life when you get hit while equipped with the wing, you just lose the wing. Which also reduces your firepower, but hey, you didn’t die. If you already have a wing equipped and pick up another, the power level of your gun goes up by one — the wing itself doesn’t maximize your firepower, but it does give you the ability to do so.
There’s also a bomb system in Gun-Nac. Bombs work differently than the standard weapons: you have to stockpile bombs by picking up any kind of bomb item you see (represented by four different letters) but the power level of your bombs won’t go up unless you pick up the same type of bomb multiple times in a row. It’s worth it to just grab every “B,” for instance, once you’ve amassed a healthy supply of bombs, but don’t be too picky: your bomb level resets with every death. You can hold up to 20 bombs at a time, and the game starts you off with four at the start of the game and each continue.
While bombs are powerful, they have their own drawbacks and situational usefulness. When you use a bomb, your gun goes back to its basic level while it’s active, which means your defenses aren’t as strong as they normally would be. It comes back once the bomb finishes its thing, though, but you do actually have to survive that process first! And bombs might eventually be screen-clearing when fully powered up or as they make their way across the screen, but it’s not instantaneous by any means. Some can take a long time to hit everything, or just focus in one specific section of the screen, and in the wrong situation, you leave yourself open to damage.
Gun-Nac is a Compile shooter, which means the stages are long. And there’s no shortage of stages, either, with eight of the things to play through. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is a matter of taste, but just know what you’re getting into: Compile rarely lets you sit down for 20-30 minutes to blow through an entire shoot ‘em up, with their non-arcade, at-home STGs more often than not lengthier endeavors.
Helping with the length here is that you’ll find you can hold on to lives in Gun-Nac far more easily than in Zanac or the Aleste titles, which has a lot to do with the wing system, but also that there aren’t procedurally generated waves of enemies here. Gun-Nac throws tons of foes at you, yes, enough to slow things down on occasion and fill up the screen, but they’re in the same place every time, so you can work on memorization or learn the kinds of patterns that were programmed in, rather than constantly be adjusting to a game that’s adjusting to you.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this means Gun-Nac is outright easy, though. There’s enough going on in this game once you hit the middle of it that you’ll understand in a hurry why the options let you prioritize the game’s speed or its sprite flickering. I figure slowdown in a shoot ‘em up is always a helpful occurrence, so keeping the sprite flickering to a minimum is my priority, but maybe you struggle when things slow down instead of finding focus.
If you do run out of lives, you do have continues so you can keep going if you get a game over, but you’ll lose whatever stockpile of bombs you had, and have to start fresh with cash, too. And, of course, your score will reset to zero. Score extends are pretty easy to get in Gun-Nac, at least, and there are 1-up items scattered around, too: they’re even bigger versions of the ship wing item.
In between levels, you can visit a store to pay to change your weapon, or add a power level to your weaponry so it shoots faster, or “drop” bombs in the next area, which just means you’re paying to have more bombs show up in a later stage. The extra bombs are not so huge in number that you’ll feel like there are too many, but it can help you out if you’re real low after a boss encounter gone wrong or whatever. It’s also not a bad idea to load up the last stage with them when you have no other use for money. If you lose a life, your total cash goes down by half, and since each bag of money you find in a level is only worth $3 and things like a weapon purchase costs $10, you’ll notice the lack of funds in a hurry. Better to spend it than lose it in death.
Speaking of money, Gun-Nac is a rarity, and priced like one. Every now and again I’d check Ebay going, “huh, why don’t I own Gun-Nac yet?” and would be quickly reminded by a bunch of $400 listings. Emulation has been the play for some time, and (unofficial) reproductions that cost 1/12th as much also exist, unless you have $400 you want to part with in exchange for a genuine copy. In which case I would like you to give me $400, please. Not for Gun-Nac, since I already had a repro and know how to use an emulator, but because $400 would be nice.
Sadly, Compile’s games just don’t see re-releases like they should. The Aleste Collection is lovely and all, but it would be more accurate if it were named The Aleste 8-Bit Collection instead, and even then, it would still be missing plenty of entries. Gun-Nac, however, seems to have been forgotten about entirely. It was never as well-known as Aleste or Gunhed in the first place, given its status as a late-life NES shooter in a genre that was always looking for something more powerful and faster, and time hasn’t made it better-known. An actual re-release would be excellent — digital, a Limited Run Games physical, a Compile collection that goes beyond what Aleste Collection did, whatever — but at this point I’d even take inclusion on the NES portion of Nintendo Switch Online. Gun-Nac is weird, and it’s also one of the greatest STGs on the console it was released on. Let’s release it on some more of them so it can shine once again.
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