General Analysis - HeladodePistacho/OUTZONE GitHub Wiki
Genre:
Out Zone is a run and gun video game, a subgenre of the shoot’em up video games.
Shoot'em up games:
In the shoot'em up games the player takes control of the main character and tries to shoot a large number of enemies while dodge their attacks.
There isn't a list with all the features to make a shoot'em up but there are some aspects that all the games respect. Shoot’em up games are usually viewed from a top-down or side-view perspective, you defeat a large number of enemies, user avatar is some kind of war vehicle or solider, the user have a variety of ranged weapons and power-ups for upgrade his avatar. The most important player’s goals are shoot as quickly as possible anything that moves, react fast, memorize enemy attack patterns and dodge enemy attaks.
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In the last player goals is where we can find the reason why this games have become so popular, because shoot the enemies at the same time you dodge the large number of shoots that are coming to you is so difficult but if you do it is exciting.
And finally one of the most notorious aspects is that shoot’em up games don’t have physics, so the user can change the direction with no inertia and enemy shoots are “easier” to dodge because they travel with a constant velocity.
Run and gun games:
Once we have defined the shoot’em up games let’s see the special aspects of the subgenre run and gun.
Run and gun genre describes a shoot’em up game in which the protagonist fights of food sometimes with the ability to jump. This kind of games may use side scrolling, vertical scrolling or isometric viewports and may feature multidirectional movement.
Considering that the user avatar can only move in a two-dimensional universe, developers use this to create a lot of obstacles that hinder the travel along the map like holes and walls. But sometimes this obstacles can be useful for dodge enemy attacks.
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History of the game:
Original creators:
- Toaplan:
Was a game developer company from japan, founded in 1984 and declared in bankruptcy in 1994, they used to create some famous scrolling shooters and other arcade games
Distributors:
- Toaplan (Japan)
- Romstar (North America and Europe):
Was a game distributor company from the USA that was founded in 1984. They started as the american distributor for SNK but then other companies as Taito, Toaplan, Capcom and Seta used their services. Romstar was closed on 1992.
Date of release:
- 1990
Versions:
- Only Arcade machine
Composer:
- Tatsuya Uemura
Cabinet:
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Upright
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Monitor:
Orientation: Vertical
Type: Raster resolution (240 x 320)
Palette Colors: 2048
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CPU: Motorolla 68000(16/32 bit)
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Control Panel Layout: Multiple Player
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Number of Simultaneous Players: 2
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Maximum number of Players: 2
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Controls:
Joystick: 8-way
Buttons: 2 (Shoot,Bomb)
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Sound: Amplified Mono
Other info
The original cabinet it was poorly distributed, luckily for us, a company called Hyperware released this game (and many many others) on a single cabinet called Ultracade.
"UltraCade Technologies, also known simply as UltraCade, was a computer and video game hardware company, founded in 2002 by David R. Foley. Founded on the original UltraCade multi-game platform that Foley's design team developed in the mid-1990s, featuring multiple classic arcade games emulated on PC hardware running proprietary operating system and emulation code... In July 2009 a grand jury indicted David R. Foley on 35 counts, claiming that he sold counterfeited game packs for the UltraCade platform. On January 9, 2012, Foley pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges related to sales of UltraCade game software and making false statements on loan applications while all claims of counterfeiting were dropped"
Currently still they sold in three screen sizes(19", 27", 33) and include 86 games,and a version of cocktail table.
