Welcome to the beginning of a series cleverly entitled "Crapcom". If Capcom is your favorite company, then beware of the harsh truth to be revealed about the famous corporation.
First, I don't hate every Capcom game ever made. In fact, Capcom was a fairly solid developer back in the late 80's and early 90's. Games like Duck Tales were lots of fun and Street Fighter II was a revolutionary legend.
Second, Capcom isn't the only greedy company out there for sure. Nintendo with it's Pokeymen, Sony with it's cheap, faulty hardware, Sega with it's abundance of crappy third party games, Hudson with it's well overused Bomberman mascot, etc... There is no doubt that these and several other companies are at fault.
And lastly, please don't judge the rest of this site just because you don't agree with this article series. I'm not the kind of guy to write gaming rants, as you can see from the rest of this site, and I tend to be much more positive with gaming. I typically don't "hate" games because I feel hate is too strong of a word and as everyone knows, I love some of the worst games you could imagine.
The purpose of this article is not so much to show why I personally don't like Capcom but for once to expose people to all of the lousy things the company has done since Capcom receives nothing but blind praise.
Capcom was founded in 1979 under the name "Japan Capsule Computers", as an electronic game machine manufacturer and distributer. The name was later changed to just "Capcom", an abbreviation of CAPsule COMputer. It wasn't until 1984 when Capcom released their first game, Vulgus.
Vulgus was a vertical arcade shooter that would switch the playfields between a planet surface to a space field and repeat the process with higher difficulty, making it a purely score based game. Considering the time it was released, it's gameplay style was a bit outdated and almost seemed like a Xevious cash in, which pioneered the genre in 1982. By and around the time Vulgus was released, superior and more original vertical shooters were available, including Star Jacker, Star Force, and Equites. Vulgus did feature a special attack, however it was rather useless as it's thinness made it hard to hit enemies, making your regular attack just as good. Considering Vulgus was Capcom's first game, I shouldn't be hitting it so hard and overall it is a fun game.
The same year Vulgus was released, Capcom took another shot at the shooter genre and scored better with the release of 1942. This was Capcom's first hit and also one of Capcom's first cheap tricks to implement in a game: to create a simple game that consisted of a ridiculous amount of levels just so it could be fed many quarters. With 32 medium length levels, you'll mostly be seeing the same sheet of ocean scroll by with the occasional land patches, the same spinning ships taken from Galaga, the same sound effects, and it's all complete with virtually no background music. Now repetitive score based shooters are fine and all, but when you actually know there is an end to the game, it encourages the player to waste as many quarters as they can until the end.
Some might be led to believe that 1942 was a shooter that invented a few things. It's not the first shooter to feature a satellite/option add-on; the earliest shooter I can find that does this is Stinger, made a year before 1942. While 1942 might be the first shooter entirely based on WWII, Konami's Time Pilot shooter made in 1982 had levels based on different time periods, with the second one taking place during WWII. The roll maneuver, an ability to dodge enemies momentarily, is not the first evading mechanic used in a shmup either. The classic Asteroids, of course, had a warp move and also in 1984, the shooter Equites was released which allowed you to jump over bullets and enemies.
While we're on the subject of 1942, I don't think I can pass up the fact that Capcom, a JAPANESE developer, made the goal of 1942 to destroy the entire Japanese air fleet. That's just... crazy. I know damn well such anti-patriotism wouldn't fly in an American game!
It doesn't just end here though. 1942 was one of the very first games from Capcom to turn into a series. Three years later, Capcom releases the appropriately named sequel "1943: The Battle of Midway". Released in 1987, 1943 was a big improvement over it's prequel. Just during the same year of 1943's release, Capcom does something that they would often later do with their other games: create an "update". Capcom updates 1943: The Battle of Midway with "1943: Midway Kaisen".
The update is questionable: it was given an arguably worse graphic and sound update, but to mix things up a bit, they made the weapons a little more exotic. One can only wonder why such a useless "enhancement" was made and why so quickly. Perhaps it was a way to quickly compete with Toaplan's bigger war shooters from the time. Or perhaps with the release of the epic shooter R-Type in the same year, as well as other hot shooters available like Gradius and Life Force, Capcom wanted their name and game to stick out in the arcades by having a new game cabinet that could be put together fast. Whatever the case may be, milking games with updates would become a trend with Capcom.
The third in the series, although retardedly named 1941, was possibly the best and most original in the series. The final two games to be released were 19XX, also a retarded name considering that no where in the 1900's will you find such laser weapon technology, and 1944, again featuring weapon technology that's pushing well beyond the actual timeline. While decent games, they lost touched with the originals and borrowed heavily from Strikers 1945 and other Psiyko and Cave shooters to fit in with their release times.
I will conclude this chapter with another one of Capcom's early and successful games, Commando. Commando is often mistaken as being the first overhead run-n-gun shooter, with other military themed games following it's footsteps. While Commando probably did open the gate for future games like the famous Ikari Warriors, it was certainly not the first of it's kind. The actual concept of an overhead game where you run around and shoot people might be traced back as early as 1975 with Midway's Gun Fight, and later more popularized with Berzerk and Robotron.
However, these kind of games had fixed screens and didn't scroll like a proper shooter, but in 1982, Taito releases Front Line, a proper military themed overhead run-n-gunner. There is no doubt that the formula Front Line created would be the same that Capcom used in Commando. Both games feature the role of a soldier who can walk in eight directions and take out enemy soldiers via a gun and grenades, while scrolling to the top of the screen for the boss fight.
More amazing was that Front Line allowed you to ride in tanks as well, something that Commando didn't feature, but SNK's Ikari Warriors did feature. Not only did Front Line and Ikari Warriors have tanks, but both also featured a similar control scheme. Front Line used a joystick for character movement and a dial for aiming, while Ikari Warriors combined all of that into one rotary joystick. This leads me to believe that Ikari Warriors may have been more inspired by Front Line, making Commando not so revolutionary after all.
And as for the Commando game itself, it had some problems. The controls just didn't "feel" right like in other overhead shooters and it was often hard to hit enemies. Unlike Front Line, this game didn't have a special method of aiming your shots (too cheap for an extra control system?) and also no kind of strafing, however I think it probably has more to do with the tiny bullet size and scattered obstacles on the screen that stop your shots. This game also had heavily repeated enemies which would come in as soon as another one died, a similar problem that would plague the Mega Man series, and as a result, it felt more like an avoiding game than a shooter. To make matters even worse, the same loopy song plays for each level, which was starting to become obsolete by 1985.
Funny enough, the Intellivsion port, developed by Realtime Associates, actually fixed the gameplay somewhat. Since the character sprites were smaller, as well as the course obstacles, this gave a better chance of hitting enemies, plus you had a wider screen giving you more room and the enemies didn't repeat as often. It may not have had accurate or pretty graphics, even compared to the Atari 2600 port, but I feel it's a better version. It's reported that the Intellivision port was very rushed and some think of it as awful, which beyond the aforementioned poor graphics, boggles me.
More interesting, it's also reported that Capcom considered filing a lawsuit against Realtime Associates just because it was considered a bad port. Considering that the Intellivsion port was released in 1987, it would've just been asinine for Capcom to do such a thing. By 1987, no one even cared about Intellivision. Even when the pre-crash video game consoles were active, there were plenty of poorly ported games. I don't hear Namco complaining about the infamously bad Pac-Man port on Atari 2600.
Commando shares the same name and year as the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "Commando". This was also during a time of other big war action flicks, such as Rambo, Missing in Action, and Red Dawn, not to mention the launch of the popular 80's G.I. Joe cartoon series. Commando was followed with a much different sequel titled "Mercs" in 1990, which took the level perspective of Bloody Wolf and almost the style of Contra.
From an early look at Capcom, we can already gather some of the foundations that would later embrace their games: cheapness, milking, stealing, and of course, greed. This was only the beginning, Capcom's evil plans would become much greater and they would be among one of the biggest video game developers and publishers. In "Crapcom: Volume 2 - Mascot Mayhem", we will take a look at how Capcom brainwashed gamers by alluring them with mascots.
- Keranu Friday, July 11th, 2008 12:53am USA Central Time.