XP Arcade: Cannon Spike
If you ever wanted to kick an attack helicopter while playing as Street Fighter's Cammy wearing roller skates, then do I have the game for you.
This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
One of the fun things about Sega’s short-lived Dreamcast is that it was actually a partner system to their NAOMI arcade board: the two even saw their initial release in Japan at the same time, in November of 1998. Because the architecture was so similar, porting arcade games — and retaining their arcade quality — was a simpler affair than it was even a generation prior. The Sega Saturn, for instance, was able to receive faithful ports of 32-bit arcade games thanks to being a 32-bit system on its own, but sometimes those ports wouldn’t show up until years later, and they weren’t always an arcade-perfect replication. Going further back, the various Master System ports of Sega’s 80s arcade games were significantly different, since they were going from 16-bit arcade technology to 8-bit home hardware: some of the definitive home editions of Sega’s arcade titles could actually be found on non-Sega systems, like with the more powerful Turbografx-16.
These ports could be comparatively instantaneous and uncompromised for the Dreamcast, however, with the arcade and home versions of a game even releasing within the same year, because the systems they were built for in the first place were so similar. The NAOMI connection even helped the Dreamcast outlive its production run by quite a bit: Karous, the final officially released Dreamcast title, first released in Japanese arcades in 2006 and then for Japanese Dreamcasts in the spring of 2007, a full six years after Sega had pulled the plug on their final console.
Obviously, Sega utilized this intentional relationship for many of their own conversions — House of the Dead 2, Samba de Amigo, Crazy Taxi, Outtrigger, Virtua Tennis, and even The Typing of the Dead were all Sega NAOMI arcade releases before receiving Dreamcast ports, and those weren’t the only ones. Sega also wasn’t the lone company to see the value in developing for their arcade hardware and then porting the results over to their home console, however: Capcom would develop 10 arcade games on the standard NAOMI hardware, and all 10 would end up on the Dreamcast as well.
One of these Capcom titles was 2000’s Cannon Spike, known as Gunspike in Japan. It released in arcades and on the Dreamcast in the same year, and is notable for a couple of things. Historically speaking, it’s the last official game released on the Dreamcast in Europe, though, that wouldn’t happen until May 3, 2002, well after its North American (November 15, 2000) and Japanese (December 21, 2000) releases. Less footnote-y and more having to do with the gameplay, though, is that Cannon Spike is a bit of a mashup endeavor for Capcom, featuring two original protagonists (well, “inspired by” protagonists is more accurate) but mostly being made up of characters from other games of theirs, taking place in locations from even more Capcom titles.
The basic story is that terrorists have created a robotic army of soldiers, mini-bosses, and bosses because the economy has crashed and made the world harder to live in, and the world’s authorities got together and decided the only thing that could stop such a force was a team made up of Street Fighter II’s Cammy (the North American title of Cannon Spike actually comes from one of Cammy’s signatures moves), Street Fighter Alpha’s Charlie, Arthur from Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Shiba, who is based on Siva from Capcom’s arcade collection, Three Wonders, and Simone, who hasn’t appeared in anything else Capcom has done before or after despite a pink-haired cyborg wearing body armor and swinging a samurai sword around. She’s based on Linn Kurosawa from Capcom’s Alien vs. Predator, who, oddly enough, has appeared in other Capcom games despite originating in a licensed title. Maybe in the next Project X Zone, Simone. Maybe then you’ll get your chance to shine again.
Oh, and everyone is wearing roller skates. Sorry, “Motor Boots,” meant to give their wearers “ultimate mobility.” They’re roller skates, though, and the entire point of them is for you to be able to move around quickly in all directions, whether to avoid enemy fire or turn and fire yourself. Shiba is on a skateboard, but the rest of the non-hidden characters are on roller skates in Cannon Spike. Oh, yeah, there are two hidden characters in the game, and you don’t even have to do anything special to unlock them: just hit left on teh character select screen when you’re already all the way left, and Mega Man is suddenly an option. Do the same for the right, and Darkstalker’s Baby Bonnie Hood, aka B.B. Hood or Bulleta, depending on the game or region, becomes available. She rides a scooter, not skates.
You will spend much of the game moving, either dodging enemies’ physical attacks or bullet patterns, or just trying to get yourself into a position to fire or melee attack them. It’s not as hectic a shooter as some of the STGs that Cannon Spike’s developer, Psikyo, is known for, but that’s mostly because if there were too many bullets or enemies to ever handle at a time, no one would have ever bothered to get in close to utilize the melee attacks that are actually more effective than the comparatively weak — though rapid-fire and ranged — guns. The balance that’s struck encourages you to split your time between skating off to find an angle to fire from safely, or to swoop in and start throwing hands. Or feet, or swords, depending on the character you’re playing as.
There are three buttons you need to concern yourself with, and you can remap them as you please from the game’s main menu. You have your basic rapid-fire shot and your basic melee attack, and then there is the “Mark” button, which lets you lock-on and strafe-skate around a target. This is great for being able to keep your aim on a foe while avoiding weapons fire or skating around other enemies you’re not quite ready to deal with but don’t want to take damage from, or if you’ve got to run in and grab one of the items defeated foes drop without ruining the accuracy of your stream of fire in the process.
You also have a special ranged attack and special melee attack, which can be performed with combined button presses or just mapped to a single button, and a character-specific super attack that, again, can be mapped to one button, or achieved by pressing all three standard attack buttons at once. These are like bombs in most shmups: you need to have one in stock in order to perform it, but on occasion, enemies will drop another one. They’ll also drop health upgrades and refills for you, too, and you’re going to want to pick up every single one of these, as even on the game’s normal setting, you have just the three credits, and each of those is just one life.
I’m a sucker for the character art in this game — 3D graphics and presentation weren’t at the point where the game itself could look like the character select art, no, but it didn’t have to for what Cannon Spike was going for. It’s still neat just to see the level of detail that went into those portraits, as well as those that appear on screen in between missions. Capcom had some truly stunning character art at this time in their history — I’m no good at most fighting games, but it’s still fun to look at SNK vs. Capcom stuff, for instance — and it’s good to see they didn’t skimp on it in a crossover effort where they handed development off to another company.
Cannon Spike is short. Like, real short, with 10 stages but some of them consisting of just a couple of small waves of foes before you tackle the boss that’s the real point and challenge of each mission. However, there are seven difficulty levels at the start, and a tougher one that unlocks should you finish the game’s 10 stages on at least level 4 (easy). Plus, you’ve got the seven different playable characters, each with their own special attacks and strategies for deploying them for max effectiveness, as well as a different stage order to tackle depending on which one you picked. And it’s a tough game, too, even on the lower difficulties, because you just don’t get much in the way of credits, and, even though there aren’t a ton of foes or bullets to blow up and dodge, respectively, enemies basically shrug off your ranged attacks and keep coming for you, and will do plenty of damage should they reach you. It might play differently than Psikyo’s shmups, which are pretty elegantly designed in terms of enemy waves and bullet patterns, but they knew how to ramp up the challenge when needed and force you to subsist on limited credits, and Cannon Spike is no different in these regards.
As a game with arcade roots, the home version can be played using the directional pad rather than the Dreamcast controller’s analog stick, which also means that Cannon Spike is compatible with arcade sticks. The Dreamcast arcade stick is a lovely one — before deciding to import one for myself given the console’s extensive arcade and shmup library, I noted quite a few enthusiasts online who built their own cabinets talking it up as an option for that sort of project as well — and being able to map the six different possible buttons to its six buttons, rather than having to press any combinations you need to muscle memory into your hands and brain, is also a nifty touch that makes the game preferable on a stick instead of on a pad. There are other arcade sticks compatible with PCs where your Dreamcast emulator might live, too, so it’s not like you absolutely need to have this one stick in order to play Cannon Spike in its most comfortable form, but hey, now you know.
Is Cannon Spike the deepest game in the world? No, but it does give you the opportunity to kick an attack helicopter while playing as Cammy wearing roller skates, or to go after that same chopper as a cyborg in roller skates wielding a samurai sword, or take down a robot army and its Cat Lady lieutenant while playing as B.B. Hood riding a scooter, so, you know. Sometimes the bar doesn’t have to be sky high. Regrettably, the only way you’re going to be able to play it these days is via emulation or on the Dreamcast, whether you do that part legally or not: it’s a game that hasn’t seen a re-release anywhere, even with Capcom so heavily dipping into their arcade history of late for their Captom Arcade Stadium series.
Alright, Project X Zone 3 for Simone, Capcom Arcade Stadium 3 for Cannon Spike, let’s do this.
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