I promise you, you'll be getting your money's worth in one way or another with Dead Moon.
So here's what's going on in Dead Moon: Sometime during man's zenith of space exploration, a meteor from a distant galaxy enters SOL and starts heading past all the planets. When attempting to study it, Earth's satellites are targeted and destroyed by the meteor. Earth's defenses realizes that this meteor is targeting Earth and bombard it with nuclear missiles. The missiles cause the meteor to aim instead for Earth's Moon and upon impact, Earth goes up to the Moon to investigate. However, instead of finding a meteor, they find an armada of alien space-force weapons which jump to life and launch an attack against Earth. You then enter the picture as a space fighter pilot fighting for Earth who has to go into the heart of the invasion and liberate Earth and its moon.
Despite its interesting aspects and artistic pointers, Dead Moon doesn't entirely live up to its name, especially in how your esoteric enemies never present a lucid twist, nor does the game carry an atmosphere that reflects its rather grim name, but for all that's proffered, it's quite frankly a well presented plot, especially with the help of the game's opening.
You can pretty much consider Dead Moon the inspiration for Taito's Metal Black in that you tackle six levels involving the Earth's Moon in the clutches of a race of militaristic aliens who possess simplistically designed fighters that take on bizarre, but clever attack formations and the race itself seems to have the ability to replicate animal life to a certain extent and does so for an extremely arbitrary yet seemingly important reason that never sees thoroughly explained and the title of the game itself sounds like something a heavy/death metal band would come up with, but the comparisons are just as strong in each game's differences.
Control wise, there's not much to say about Dead Moon in that you control a bizarre human ship which I can't imagine landing on wheels without the help of some gravitational mechanism blasting enemies left and right. The game is a wee bit easy in that unlike most horizontal shooters like it, there's no collision deaths: every level lacks a back ground for you to collide into, yet as simplistic as this seems to ignore, I can't really criticize it because for years I've always seethed over how most shooters (Metal Black included) have you die every time your ship touches the back ground despite how painstakingly slow your ship/space jet seems to be traveling.
You go on a linear path of destruction destroying anything foolish or daring to get in your way while picking up different upgradable weapons which leads us to the game's weapon system. Every time you pick up a weapon, you gain an extra hit meaning that as your weapons increase so does your armor all of which allows you to take more hits from your enemies while dishing out more damage.
Your weapons offer a lot of destructive potential: you start with your bog-standard vulcan shot which spreads out in different directions with every upgrade including a rear-firing capability, the red pick-ups give you a similar type weapon with bigger, slightly stronger shots, the green pick ups give you a wave-shot weapon that widens as you upgrade it and the blue pick-ups give you four little lasers that encircle a huge white beam of death once it reaches the zenith of its upgrades.
Other pick-ups include red homing missiles that despite being helpful in some situations otherwise feel like a complete waste of time and the blue shield orbs, actual shields that stay at the bottom and top of your ship like the orbs of R-Type until you upgrade them so that they multiply and encircle your ship and live up to their name as a shield against enemy shots. You also get wonderfully explosive, but dreadfully unimaginative bombs to counter enemy attacks.
The pick ups seem to have a liking to you as pick-ups will show up every two or so minutes during boss fights according to whichever weapon you chose earlier.
The enemies have some unique attack patterns, especially the enemies from level five that fire waves of torpedoes at you. For the most part though, you'll be facing various pop-corn enemies who either kamikaze into or shoot at you and both of which offer legitimate challenges. There are some unique attacks that only occur in certain levels such as the mortar-like flare shots that shoot out of distant moon craters and stay on the screen forcing you to avoid them while fighting dozens of enemy ships.
The design of the enemies certainly look foreign and are passable alien fighter craft, despite some of them being highly under-detailed and others possessing strange attack patterns like two silver spheres that spin from behind you in order to make their way at the other end of the screen and home-in on you from there and L-shaped enemies that zip on to the screen formed as a block before quickly breaking apart and spinning at you. Some of the mini-bosses are very unique enemies and have just as unique attacks though a few them look like they came out of Gradius. If anything most of the mini-bosses tend to depend to much on their massive ship-size as a weapon to crush your ship with which makes their attacks - fire everything they have, dive towards the left of the screen and repeat - too predictable.
The bosses are the most notable of enemies you face as all of them are Godzilla sized skeletons with internal organs and occasionally evil red eyes. A lot of them have very clever attacks and different attack patterns particularly the zombified Gamera boss of level 2 as well as the game's Darius/Deep Blue type boss later on.
Speaking of which, you can also consider Dead Moon finding some inspiration from Darius (another horizontal shooter) in that your ship always follows the direction of the boss you're fighting. Every time a boss shifts to the left of the screen (where the player usually is), then the player's ship will swiftly turn around and face the boss' direction.
As far as sound goes, Dead Moon offers the basic line-up of TG16 sounds, some of which sounded like the came from Ninja Spirit, but the game does have some sounds unique to itself such as the sound of the player's ship blasting off and the sounds of the mortar fired flares in round 3 I mentioned earlier.
The Music on the other hand is... well, I wouldn't exactly say it's perfect as there are some songs that just don't sound too great owing mostly to the last three levels, but as far as TG16 games goes, the QUALITY of Dead Moon's music is probably the most amazing, even beating out Blazing Lazers! The mere quality of the music is strong enough to give the player the impression that it was game's primary mission statement.
At times the music will take on different musical genres stuck between hard rock tunes and your usual video game bit-pop sound, but both of which, combined or separate, sound flat out incredible. The first three levels are some of the best songs a shmup fan could ask for in a game with enough variety and catchiness to warrant a CD release. The rock tunes contribute to this a bit as there's an evident drum beat that kicks in during the main menu and at the end of every level as well as during some of the level songs and the more you hear it, the more realistic it sounds.
The graphics themselves are pretty good for a TG16 title, though at times it doesn't do anything ground breaking. Some of the backgrounds are quite pretty, but the pretty backgrounds pretty much end halfway-through the game before going down generic-city. If anything the minor details such as the asteroids in level 2 and the segments in which your ship blasts off are nice. If there's anything bad I can say about the graphics is that at times it feels like wasted potential, particularly near the end and how the first two levels are the only ones with an actual definable Starting point and Beginning point. You'd expect the alien armada to have some kind of factory set up in the Moon's mantle, but nothing present.
Although Dead Moon doesn't offer much in atmospherics despite its imagery, Dead Moon does have some of the best edge of your seat action a shooter can offer. There are moments in the game where the enemies just bum-rush their way at you to the point where you felt like you broke a dam full of them and started fighting the flood back. And as tough as this may sound, the game is very friendly to the gamer unfamiliar to the seemingly deceased Shoot em' Up genre.
So all in all, I definitely recommend Dead Moon if you're a Turbo Grafix 16 collector or if you're looking for more games on your Wii, but for Christ's sake, stop thinking a game like Dead Moon needs more than one game mode or more than one player in order to be fun! The game is as fun as it is, so find it and enjoy it for what it is; I promise you, you'll be getting your money's worth in one way or another with Dead Moon.