History and technical profile

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Gun Smoke is a vertical scroller shooter shot'em up game developed by Capcom in 1985. The game was designed by Yoshiki Okamoto. Gun Smoke used an Upright cabinet with controls for one player or two players depending of the cabinet.

Arcade cabinet of the game

Used a Zilog Z80(4MHz) CPU, a Zilog Z80(3MHz) or a Yamaha YM2203(1,5MHz) sound and a raster resolution of 256x224 (verticalxhorizontal).

The music was composed by Ayako Mori.

Gun Smoke had two more versions released under license in America by Romstar. One of them fixed the sequence of bosses, and in the other version released the thirth and the sixth level were swapped.

In the game you have some power-ups to help you. A horse, to protect you from enemy hits, boots, to have extra movement speed, bullets, to shot faster, and a rifle, to have more shot range. The player can achieve the power-ups shooting the barrels distribute along the maps.

The main carachter with the horse

Genre

Gun Smoke is a Shoot'em up arcade game. This game requires knowing the enemies respawn because althought it seems easy, is a difficult game, especially in the final of each level, when you are trying to beat the final boss.

Subgenre and similar games

Gun Smoke belong to the subgenre vertical scrolling shooters, that is a subgenre that the action is viewed from above and scrolls up the screen. There are some other games with the same subgenre like Raiden, Gunbird or Commando, among others.

Raiden, an example of a Scrolling shooter game

The beggining of the genre is confused, because it is not concreted if the first Shoot'em up game was Spacewar or Space invaders. On the one hand Brian Ashcraft, a videogame journalist, said that the first genre game was Spacewar, but on the other hand, Space invaders is more frequently cited as the first of the genre.

Space invaders, 1979

Shoot'em ups games were popular in the 1980s and the 1990s. While the years passed, the games were having considerable movement imporvement and graphic progress.

Final Bosses

Final boss of map 1

Final boss of map 2

Final boss of map 3

Final boss of map 4

Final boss of map 5

Final boss of map 6

Final boss of map 7

Final boss of map 8

Final boss of map 9

Final boss of map 10

Versions

Gun Smoke was ported to many systems, including the MSX and Commodore 64. In Europe, it was released on the Amstrad CPC and Sinclair ZX Spectrum under the name Desperado. The game was also ported to the Famicom Disk System and NES in 1988, with some alterations. The original arcade version was released on several later generation platforms under compilation titles such as Capcom Generation 4 and Capcom Classics Collection.

Differences between the arcade version and the NES version

There are some differences between the two versions. In the NES version there were only six levels, so six final bosses (Master, Ninja, Cutter, Wolf Chief, Los Pubro, and Fat Man). Billy has more weapons to choose, including a shotgun, a machine gun, a smart bomb and a magnum.

In this version there was a storyline. The final boss, the Wingate family, in the NES version were a gang and not a father and their sons. The bosses had their appereance changed. For example, Master wore a red shirt and blue jeans.

Finnally, four of the final bosses had their name changed. Master to Bandit Bill, Wolf Chief to Devil Hawk, Fat Man to Fat Man Joe and Los Pubro to Wingate.