Re-release this: Trax
Re-release this: Trax
Not exactly a lost classic, but HAL's multi-directional shooter released over three decades ago and has never been seen again. An update in the present could work very well.
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.
It’s really a shame that the pre-Kirby past of HAL Laboratory doesn’t often get to see the light of day in the present, if at all. Trax, a multi-directional shooter released for the Game Boy in 1991, is one such title. It had its initial release, was reviewed mostly positively, and then just kind of vanished. It’s never seen a re-release, it’s never had a sequel, and it’s actually pretty difficult to find any information about it anywhere. MobyGames, which is something of a compendium for information on video games going back decades, lists exactly one person in its credits: composer Hirohiko Takayama. Who else at HAL worked on Trax? It’s a mystery!
A Wikipedia page for the game exists, and here are its contents (outside of release date, developer, publisher, etc. sidebar) in full: “Trax is a shooter game for Nintendo's Game Boy developed by HAL Laboratory and published by HAL Laboratory in Japan and Electro Brain in other regions. It was released on January 8, 1991, in Japan and released in September 1991 overseas.” That’s legitimately the entire page, and the information on it came from the aforementioned MobyGames entry.
When you complete the game, it goes to a “The End” animation that keeps on playing, and never actually shows the credits. It’s also a pretty short game, so there’s really only so much that can be said about it. My guess is that this is one of those games HAL released when they were starting to have financial trouble, and were desperately pushing back against impending bankruptcy by trying to release games in a hurry. So, something like Trax had some good ideas and is fun to play, but it’s very short — like, 20 minutes or so, if you get through it in one go — reuses a bunch of assets and encounters, and then doesn’t even have end-game credits telling us who worked on the thing.
This is how Satoru Iwata, who became president of HAL in 1992, described the situation leading to his becoming president and Nintendo buying up enough of HAL to make them a second-party developer (interview translation courtesy Shmuplations):
By the time of the [Super Famicom], we had published a number of titles under our own name as HAL Laboratory, but we were under immense time pressures during this period. As you probably know, in 1992 the company almost went bankrupt. It was due to that crisis that I ended up becoming President. We were caught in a vicious circle…
…It went like this: we didn’t have enough time, so we released games before they were really finished and ready for release, then those games wouldn’t sell very well because they weren’t very good… which put us in an even more desperate position for our next development. Obviously this wasn’t going to work, and the only way to break out of this cycle was to create a proper game, something that would garner the support of players. But as developers, the whole situation had taken a big toll on our morale.
The “proper game” Iwata mentioned ended up being Kirby’s Dream Land, but that wouldn’t be until April of 1992 in Japan, and August of the same year in North America. Trax released in January of 1991, before the August ‘91 release of Metal Slader Glory really sent HAL spiraling, but not necessarily before the cycle Iwata mentioned had begun. The fact that Trax, for all of its fun, feels a little unfinished, is further evidence of that.
It’s not that Trax takes 20-25 minutes to play. So does Kirby’s Dream Land, and that game is a lot of fun, too. It’s that there is nothing beyond the same experience again after you complete it once, and no little extras that could have given it more life. Kirby’s Dream Land had an unlockable hard mode, the code to which was revealed once you completed it one time: this gave you reason to replay and to challenge yourself. It let Kirby’s Dream Land be the kind of soft-landing, intro to platformers that the genre needed and creator Masahiro Sakurai wanted it to be, but it also gave players an opportunity to play a tougher version of the game once they were ready for it (or, at least, once the game was ready to acknowledge they were ready for it). While Dream Land had a code, multiple difficulty levels or various challenges where the difficulty were ramped up from the standard experience — often unlocked after completing the game once — became a common occurrence in Kirby games.
While Kirby’s Dream Land was all HAL Laboratory outside of what the name of the series would be — Sakurai originally named the titular Kirby Popopo, and his first game Twinkle Popo, until Nintendo of America intervened on the latter — Nintendo did make one other, non-financial contribution to the project: the tougher challenge mode mentioned above. That was Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto’s idea — in the posthumous essay collection, Ask Iwata, Iwata says Miyamoto told them to delay the release of Dream Land for additions and tweaks like that because “This game deserves more attention.” It was a pretty good suggestion, too, since it’s been 30 years and I still get to say, “Sure, Kirby’s Dream Land is easy, but there’s always the challenge mode if you’re looking for something tougher.” And also Kirby’s Dream Land ended up being the best-selling Kirby ever, so there’s that, too.
Anyway, the point of this diversion is to point out that Trax didn’t get the same kind of care or consideration: it was released in what seemed to be an unfinished state. It’s not that the game lacks fun or enjoyment, nor is it buggy, but consider this: the credits are nowhere to be found, there are all of four stages, with the fourth mostly being a boss rush leading you to the final encounter, and it is an arcade-style shooter game that doesn’t keep track of your score, not within a single play nor on any kind of leaderboard. It has the one difficulty, and could have really used multiple ones to give the game replayability and further challenge. And yet, all we’ve got is the basic 20-25 minute run of the game, on one difficulty, and no additional frills outside of vs. muliplayer supported by the Game Boy’s link cable.
What’s really a shame about all of this is that Trax is still fun to play in its basic form: like Kirby, it deserved more. You pilot a tank built by rebels, in the hopes of toppling an unjust regime. The tank is very cute, as far as tanks go — if you’ve played Kirby titles, the design of the tank should remind you quite a bit of the Moto Shotzo enemy — but because it was built by some rebels and isn’t exactly up to code, it has wheels instead of treads, and, while it can shoot in eight directions, can only do so with repeated button presses that turn the cannon clockwise, one angle at a time. Having to cycle through these shot directions was a good way to deal with both the limitations of the Game Boy’s two face button setup and create a bit of tension and forced movement within Trax itself: you’ll try to avoid enemies and their projectiles while setting yourself up for the shot that’ll blow both away, and it keeps both you and the game moving.
Since more enemies appear the more you progress through the levels — scrolling is not forced in this multi-direction shooter, but instead occurs as you yourself move through stages — you have to be careful about how aggressively you avoid enemy fire, too. Move a little too far out of the way and scroll the screen ahead, and you’ll find you have even more enemies to contend with. Take things a little slow, though, and you’ll be able to carefully isolate every foe and unearth all of the game’s power-ups without finding yourself unnecessarily surrounded.
This is HAL, so enemy designs are often adorable or intriguing, like the helicopter boss that looks like an insect and removes its propeller to throw it at you, or the Smithy-esque, weapons-producing final boss that predates Super Mario RPG by half-a-decade. And it all animates well, too, with expressive sprites and impressive explosions. Which, again, is why it’s a shame there isn’t more of it. More enemy types, more bosses, more stages, something.
What’s here is enjoyable, at least. Trax uses a health bar instead of having the tank explode after a single hit, and you refill it by finding gasoline cans hidden across levels or sometimes from defeated foes. There are multiple weapon types — a standard cannon that shoots single shots, one that fires both in front of and behind your tank, a wide shot with three projectiles that fire slower but over a larger area, and an explosive round that tears through basically anything, though, it fires even slower than the wide shot. You lose your weapon upgrade whenever you take damage, so even outside of just trying to save your health, you’ll want to avoid being hit. Between this and changing the direction your cannon is firing, and moving around constantly in order to make that work appropriately, Trax always feels active: it’s 20 minutes, but 20 minutes with some depth to it.
It helps, too, that the game scrolls both vertically and horizontally, that you find yourself outdoors and indoors, in order to keep everything feeling fresh. And while the game starts out easy enough and never gets truly challenging, the difficulty does slowly ramp up, especially for the fourth stage, which is a boss rush, yes, but does not feature what you’d call downtime in between those boss fights.
Trax should be available once again — that it never released on the Nintendo 3DS eShop as a Virtual Console title is curious, and it costs more secondhand now than it did as a new release — but even better than just releasing the original into the world for the first time since 1991 would be for HAL to revisit the entire concept and get it completely right this time. Expand on the original game, with the style of 1991 but using today’s tech and horsepower, to make a retro-focused multi-directional shooter that includes everything the original did not, for whatever reason it did not. The core concept is good here, and even lacking in the many things it does, it’s still enjoyable to play — hell, include the original version with this update, too, so that it’s no longer lost. Do something with Trax and the ideas it contains, besides letting it sit and rot in the past.
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