Leger vs. In the Hunt (Saturn)

Near the end of Irem in the arcades a group of people later forming Nazca Corporation of Metal Slug fame put together a game in the west known as In the Hunt.

It shows, since In the Hunt both looks and feels like a underwater version of Metal Slug where the player controls a submarine which may shoot in three directions (up, forward and down).

Certainly not a crowded genre, especially considering the choice of vehicle, this not automatically scrolling run and gun (or shoot 'em up, whatever you prefer) got ported to the Playstation and the Saturn (aswell as Windows and later to more modern systems such as the Switch and Evercade).

Not having played the Windows version my guess is that the Saturn version is the worst of the bunch.

While the inclusion of a really ugly and repetitive (some scenes are shown over and over again) full motion video acting as an introduction does not matter much, the terrible and frequent slowdowns makes the game extremely annoying to play.

The game looks truly beautiful, with detailed animations of both the environments and whatever interacting with dito. Windows in the hundreds breaks in a visually satisfying manner, explosions and projectiles can fill up the screen and small people only a couple of pixels in size runs around in the background trying to stay alive in the midst of the chaos.

However, as soon as things start to get hectic the game starts to crawl and the already slow submarine starts to feel like it trying to plow through tar.

Combine this with some truly awful collision detection where the hitbox of the submarine seems impossible to figure out (not to mention that huge things flying over the screen, projectiles and debris, sometimes kills you and sometimes not) many, many, many deaths seem to come out of nowhere.

And if this was not enough, already the first boss delivers an attack which seems almost impossible to avoid no matter what you do, and this is something reoccuring over and over again through the game.

Passages which seem like you have to die to get past, if you do not happen to get lucky and get an opening where you most often do not get one (such as trying to navigate the rows of giant rockets going up the screen which you can not sqeeze in between, destroy or do anything with besides speeding them up or slowing them down depending on where you shoot them).

By the third stage of six in total the game goes completely haywire.

Yes, it is extremely impressive to be chased by a giant stone, uh, giant while traversing upwards. Getting big shit to fall on its face until it breaks and reveals muscles, blood and whatnot beneath.

But here the slowdowns get unbearable, enemies multiply in numbers, explosions appear everywhere and the screen gets so filled with happenings that it seems impossible to be in control of the situation.

This original version from Japan do offer unlimited continues, so to plow through the entire game is really not a problem.

Normally this would feel like a great way to pratice all of the stages to finally be able to go 1CC on the game, but the more I play the more frustrated I get having to deal with the unbalanced gameplay and annoyingly bad programming (even the graphics seems to fuck up on stage four with huge parts of buildings you go through shaking unintentionally, making it all seem glitched).

The insight of having to deal with the frustration of it all over and over again until I (maybe) will manage to beat it without using any continues makes me finally come to the conclusion that I will never, ever, bother to learn how to beat the game.

I could go on talking about the power up system (which consists of an M and A changing the upward projectiles, and a blue, red and green orb changing the forward moving projectiles), but sticking with the M (Missiles) and the blue magnetically attracting variant (Supersonic Torpedoes) is pretty much all that is needed to be bothered about.

Unbalanced and underdeveloped system, indeed.

Oh, and the soundtrack seems to be changed from the original one found in the arcade version to something more anonymous, generic, and technotic sounding; Even when playing the game loudly without any sfx nothing seem to get stuck on my mind.

The music is not bad, it just feels uninspired and do nothing to elevate the joy of playing the game. It is sort of... just there.

Also, if chasing a high score to brag about you will have to take notes since they are not saved, and going co-op (which is a nice feature) do not do any good when taking the already terrible slowdowns into consideration.

In the Hunt, known as Kaitei Daisensou in Japan, simply fails to live up to its beautiful graphics and promising concept. It seems stuck between the equally game changing R-Type series and Metal Slug, seemingly not knowing how to proceed in a good manner.