The absolute high-point of horizontal shooters
User Rating: 9.7 | Gate of Thunder TCD
Gate of Thunder was the pack-in game and one of the first developed for the Tubrografx-16 Super CD console, also known as the Turbo-Duo. It helps cement the legacy of the Turbo-Duo as being the best outlet for on-rails 2D shooters, in fact I consider Gate of Thunder to be among the very best horizontal-shooters ever made, if not the very best. The game has a very standard shooter story background-save the universe from the seemingly over-powering opposition-but the style that the game carries itself with is very cool, the game has a certain swagger about it that I really like. Game-play/Play-mechanics: This game represents the perfect play-control for a horizontal-shooter, the ship control is just so free, smooth, and feels very natural and promptly becomes second-nature. Everything regarding the basic controls is tweaked to perfection and therefore Gate of Thunder is a joy to pick up and play and replay. The common enemies and patterns are quite involving to encounter and react to, and the game always has this up-tempo nature to the action which keeps everything nice and intensive. Each of the three primary weapons are useful, practical, and help to create a very balanced weapon selection, something that can’t be said for many games in this genre. The bosses are decent but perhaps a weak-link to the overall experience; they are fun to encounter but not all that impressive in design. Gate of Thunder is a moderate challenge for the first five levels, and then the difficulty noticeably increases for the last two stages; the pace of the game ranges from upbeat to blistering. Gate of Thunder is a continuity shooter, meaning that you exhaust all of your ships at once and start at the beginning of the level upon failure, as opposed to only having one ship to use at a time and returning to a pre-determined checkpoint upon failure. I pretty much like shooters either way but I do prefer the continuity approach that Gate of Thunder features, the game-play flows more smoothly that way.
Visuals/Artwork: Gate of Thunder does feature some visual improvements over the shooters that use the standard TG-16 Hu-card medium. I would say beyond that the graphics are good for the most part however the color scheme can be slightly dull now and then. There is a ton of action on the screen, which is also a very important visual factor and the game does thrive in this regard. I like many of the animations and patterns of the common enemies as well as the sub-bosses. The end-level bosses are usually mid-sized and look alright but I’ve seen much better. Levels in the game are not too varied on a visual level however there a couple of stages (Stage 2 is a cave theme and stage 5 is a desert/underwater hybrid theme) that break the mold of what is primarily outer-space and metallic environments, some cool background special effects are also in place for a few of the levels. The players’ ship fire-power and enhancements look good without over-doing it, and the super-bomb attack is very basic looking however I do like it for practical game-play purposes and personally wouldn’t want it to be embellished visually beyond necessity.
Music/Sound: The music is some of my favorite in all of videogames, extremely complementary to the on-screen action. It is mostly raw, guitar driven hard-rock with some electronic techno also mixed in on some tracks. The music for Stage 1 and stage 6 are the biggest highlights, the music-arrangement timing seems perfect for the action, like the way that the stage 1 music increases in tempo just as the on-screen action kicks things into a higher gear, little nuances like that really contribute in a positive way to the overall experience. I also like the voice-overs when getting a weapon of using a super-attack; again it is all very stylized and oozes coolness, it’s almost if the player should have a pair of sunglasses handy to accentuate the mood.
