Greetings to readers!
Although I’m not that close to shooting games, in today’s post I’ll talk about a game that I played a lot on the PC, in pre-Windows XP times: Shogo Mobile Suit Armor. It was a cool game that entertained me a lot with its shooting and battles with giant mechs. Follow along.
Launched in 1998 by Monolith, Shogo was just another shooting game among so many that populate this genre, but thanks to the competence of its producers, it managed to stand out and was very well evaluated. This was another one of those games that I bought original in a magazine for a much friendlier price than if it were boxed. I don’t remember how much it was, but when I bought it at the newsstand I know I had never heard of that game and I bought it right away. I nailed it (thankfully), it was money well spent.
Despite being a western shooter, the game adopted an aesthetic clearly inspired by Japanese anime, today it would sound a bit generic, but at the time I think it worked well. The game even emulates that unnecessary drama of certain animes, in that silly line of the “personal war within the bigger war” that divides the protagonist, whose mission is also to find the missing brother (or any other junk of the genre). This aesthetic decision also extended to other elements such as the design of robots, weapons and even enemies. As I was going through an anime fan phase at the time, I really enjoyed it.
Game opening. A little embarrassing, but forgivable!
The cool thing about the game is that it is divided into phases with robots and phases “on foot”, with different rhythms and challenges, which created different sensations within the game experience. There were three different models of mecha, with some variations between speed and weight characteristics, (besides the different design for each one), which although they weren’t very different from each other in the gameplay aspect, at least added some depth to them. The battles with the robots were the coolest in the games, it was really cool to blow up the enemy robots or crush the tanks with that big robot style Macross. The stages, let’s say “human”, followed the scheme more similar to the traditional shooting games of the time, except for one or another situation of having to trigger a special switch or find an NPC that was part of the plot.
It wasn’t a game that revolutionized the genre, nor did it introduce new elements, but it had a very pleasant gaming experience, and the magazine price made it even more worthwhile. It was technically competent, with good graphics and effects, a decent soundtrack, and well-implemented anime-style voice acting. Unfortunately, compatibility issues prevented me from replaying it, so I don’t know if the game has aged well. Of course, the memory is always somewhat distorted in relation to reality, but I am aware that I spent hours of fun with this toy.
If anyone figures out a way to play the game and wants to try out an old school 3D shooter, give this game a shot. shogo. It was the closest a Western production company has come to making something genuinely Japanese, and it worked really well. There’s even a song sung at the end, to the delight of anime fans. Here’s the tip.
