Reader request: HyperZone

HAL showed off what the new Super Nintendo could do with this Mode 7-heavy rail shooter.

This column is “Reader request,” which should be pretty self-explanatory. If you want to request a game be played and written up, leave a comment with the game (and system) in question, or let me know on Twitter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Did you know: HAL Laboratory used to make games that weren’t published by Nintendo? They were close with Nintendo even before they were a second-party developer for them, as one of HAL’s employees, Satoru Iwata, had helped to foster a relationship between the two so that HAL would have work to do on the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System, all the way back in 1983. And Nintendo would eventually rescue HAL from bankruptcy, supposedly on the condition that Iwata would be appointed president, which occurred in 1993. Kirby might be a Nintendo property, too, thanks to a deal between the two companies that has them splitting ownership of the pink puffball 50/50, but HAL has other series and games that are all them, or were even published by the likes of Squaresoft.

One such game that HAL published is 1991’s HyperZone. It’s a rail shooter that showed off what the new Super Nintendo was capable of from a technical standpoint as well as any of Nintendo’s first-party works like F-Zero or Pilotwings or Super Mario Kart did, one that, like all three of those, was extremely heavy on its use of faux-3D Mode 7 graphics. Try to imagine a game that slaps together elements of the Space Harrier games with the original SNES version of F-Zero, and you’ve got a decent approximation of what HyperZone is. It’s not quite as fast as either of them, no, but it still throws loads of enemies at you like Space Harrier does, and expects you to react to extremely damaging guard rails on a “track” like F-Zero, all while utilizing similar faux-3D effects of both classics.

There are eight stages in HyperZone, and you’d be forgiven for thinking there isn’t much going on here after the first of them. It turns out that this level is as basic as it gets in design and in the ship you use, and is mostly just to get you used to the general rules of the game: it isn’t representative of the challenge or enjoyment you can extract from this rail shooter. You will die in HyperZone. That’s basically guaranteed. Trying to learn how to minimize that death, and to play for as long as possible, is the goal. Like so many old-school shooters, HyperZone actually plays on a loop: there are eight stages, but you just go back to the beginning once you’ve completed them, and try to keep going. If you want to rack up a real lofty score, completing the loop and beginning a new one is the way to do it. It’s also difficult to do since, again, you will be exploded with some regularity, given that you have enemies firing at you as well as environmental obstacles sapping energy from your craft whenever you bump into or fly over them.

Image credit: MobyGames

Let’s talk about those environments for a moment. The game’s stages have floors and ceilings and walls, even when seemingly outdoors. You can veer off of the track with your ship, but doing so will cause damage to you, either because you crashed into a rail or an obstacle, or are flying over something that is not safe to fly over. This will sap energy from your ship, which can be recovered, but not with enough regularity that you won’t regret these kinds of self-inflicted wounds. Enemies are plentiful, as are their projectiles, and you will need to learn to balance firing as fast as possible with taking time to charge for more powerful attacks that can wipe swaths of the screen clear of opposition, all while avoiding being hit by enemy attacks and managing to stay on course. It’s a lot, and while boss fights are somewhat disappointing in their repetitiveness and relative lack of difficulty, simply getting to them in the first place can be a challenge.

You could technically do your best to avoid enemy fire or engaging with enemy defenses, but then you wouldn’t score points. And you need points in order to upgrade to more powerful ships, as well as to earn extra lives, and you need both of those if you’re going to get anywhere in this game — there are no continues in HyperZone, given its short length and looping mechanic, so extra lives are extremely precious even with how liberally they’re handed out for scoring thresholds. There are also point thresholds that allow you to acquire a new, more powerful vessel with stronger and faster-charging charged attacks when you begin your next level, and once you do you’ll see the benefits of taking down as much as you can in your runs, in order to maximize points.

I mentioned that you can recover some of your ship’s energy: you do so in a very F-Zero way, by driving over glowing strips on the “course” that act the same way the glowing pits did in F-Zero. These pits aren’t usually as long nor as generous with the energy recovery as F-Zero’s, however, and sometimes they’re purposefully put after or right before obstacles that could very well kill you if you don’t pull off flying through them perfectly: the best-case scenario in these situations is often you only take a little bit of damage. And you often have ships firing at you the whole time, too, creating the occasional scenario where it might actually be safer and better for you to not heal yourself. With practice, though, and knowledge of where these recharge strips are, you can charge up an attack that will clear the road, and time your flying just right so you take minimal damage en route to recovering health.

This might be a rail shooter, but you can slow down your ship. The thing is, you don’t want to do that for too long. Maybe it’ll be useful on occasion in order to do your best to avoid flying over an area that’ll damage you, or to give yourself a little more time to destroy an enemy that is flying right toward you and takes quite a few shots before it’ll go down, but if you are going slow for too long, your ship begins to take damage. You can die via braking, basically, so, only do it when it makes a lot of sense to, and try not to do it for too long, lest you cause a more significant problem for yourself than simply speeding forth would have created.

The graphics are really astounding for the time, at least insofar as the track and ship and enemy portions of things go, and do an excellent job of showing what the SNES could do that other systems of the time were not: Sega might have had immense success with sprite-scaling and pseudo-3D in the arcade, for instance, but their home conversions of Space Harrier and its ilk were not nearly as visually appealing or impressive. (Of course, this isn’t a knock on what the Master System or Genesis were capable of doing: there are plenty those systems managed to astound with that the NES and SNES looked comparatively poor while attempting.)

The final product of HyperZone might just be pseudo-3D, but it is also capable of actual stereoscopic 3D, should you know how to access it, and have a pair of 3D glasses to don. Nintendo Life has the details:

You see, HyperZone contains stereoscopic 3D support, but it can only be enabled by inputting a cheat code and Nintendo never got around to releasing the hardware needed to make this effect work. This type of visual trickery requires a set of 'active shutter' glasses like the ones released for the 8-bit Famicom in Japan, so it could be that Nintendo initially had plans to release a pair for the SNES, but never did so.

However, it's actually possible to play HyperZone in true 3D – but to do so, you'll need quite a lot of equipment.

…

The code required to turn on the 3D mode is:

Select, Select, A, B, Select, Select, X, Y, Select, Select, L, R, Up

If entered correctly, the HyperZone title text will change from orange to red. You can then turn the effect off and on again by pressing Select. The catch – beyond the large outlay required to obtain all of the necessary equipment – is that the game contains slowdown which means the 3D effect falls out of sync with the glasses

HAL was so intent on showing what the SNES could do from a tech standpoint that they created a mode that only had hypothetical support, and would never officially materialize. Even if it doesn’t quite work perfectly for the stated technical reasons even if you can manage to scrounge together the needed equipment Nintendo never provided themselves, it’s still wildly impressive.

While HyperZone is maybe more fun for rail shooter sickos like myself who are happier with a game that takes 30 minutes to complete than your average gamer is, one thing we can all agree on is that it’s an excellent example of the kind of work that composer Jun Ishikawa was capable of. Ishikawa joined HAL in 1990, and HyperZone was the second SNES game that he would compose for, after HAL’s Hole in One Golf. The soundtrack is great, from start to finish, and there are also some tracks that are notable not just because of their quality, but because of their names.

For instance, the fifth stage is called “Ripple Field,” which also just so happens to be the name of a world in Kirby’s Dream Land 3, which was another game that Ishikawa was the sole composer for. The fourth stage of HyperZone is “Grass Land,” which, again, is the name of an area within Kirby’s Dream Land 3. And the last stage of Dream Land 3 is actually named Hyper Zone, so, you know, some people at HAL might have had some fond feelings for this mostly forgotten SNES title.

The track for Ripple Field — the HyperZone one, I mean — actually sounds like it belongs in a Kirby game. Kirby didn’t exist yet — Kirby’s Dream Land would arrive on the Game Boy in 1992 — so if you want to argue that the first Kirby song Ishikawa ever put in a video game actually predates the pink puffball, I won’t argue with you. Seriously, though, listen to this and tell me you can’t picture Kirby running around as it plays:

Really, though, that’s just the Ishikawa sound, and since he was the first composer for Kirby, the one that brought us Green Greens and King Dedede’s theme, the one that worked alone on Dream Land 3, which played such a huge role in the evolution of Kirby’s sound, and has been there producing music for Kirby games for 30 years now, it’s no wonder that my brain goes “that’s a Kirby song” when I hear something older than it.

The whole soundtrack is great, but the second half of it is where the kind of Ishikawa sound you might recognize really rears its head. Ripple Field, Bioplant, Neo Megalopolis, Hyper Zone, all of it is setting us up for a sound that millions of people are going to become very used to in a hurry once HAL founds the series that truly put them on the map and kept them there.

HyperZone might not be for everyone, and hasn’t even received the same kind of basic re-release treatment that some other non-Kirby HAL properties like Adventures of Lolo have, but it’s an enjoyable time for rail-shooter fans with a great soundtrack, and it shows off a specific moment in video game history well. It’s no wonder that developers were so quick to jump on actual 3D graphics the second consoles were powerful enough to produce even basic ones: they were obsessed with wringing as much as they could out of pseudo-3D tech in the years beforehand, which is how we ended up with sprite-scaling classics like Space Harrier, Mode 7 wonders like F-Zero and Super Mario Kart, and, eventually, customized tech that allowed games like Star Fox to exist on a system that did not have the hardware to make them happen on its own.

HyperZone isn’t remembered as fondly or considered as important as any of those titles, no, but it’s still worth checking out, and impressive enough in its own way, and not just for what it said about the technical skill HAL had even 30-plus years back. You can’t find it anywhere these days besides emulation, but luckily, it does emulate smoothly, so the only issues with it to deal with are ones that existed in the original cartridge and hardware.

Thanks to @scottgrauer on Twitter for the game request

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