SEGA Dreamcast: Incoming

Yikes! Alien invaders are storming the Earth and it looks like it’s all up to me to fight them off. Why didn’t anyone come up with this idea for a video game before now? It’s brilliant! OK, but sarcasm aside, there’s nothing fresh or original about Incoming’s premise. Hell, even the gameplay is rather unoriginal. It’s a POV shooter that lets you climb behind the controls of various military vehicles and blast away. It’s not all that remarkable, but it does manage to inject just enough of its own personality to make enjoyable.

Incoming’s gameplay is based on missions, which are broken down into different phases. Each mission takes place in a different area and each phase puts the player in command of a different ground vehicle or aircraft and sets up different goals to achieve, and it’s not all strictly about shooting. At one point, I had to hop into an attack chopper and pick up and deliver supplies, then hop into a turret and defend an airbase while cargo planes take off. Next I was instructed to take control of a tank and patrol waypoints around a base. There are a lot of different vehicles and fixed place guns to take control of, and while there are some fundamental differences between controlling a helicopter, tank, turret, or harrier jet, I didn’t have much trouble adjusting to each new set of controls. Switching vehicles is scripted and automatic and carrying out missions never resorts to more than following a directional indicator and shooting enemies. The game even lets you switch between 1st or 3rd person camera views.

But no matter what mission I found myself playing, or which war machine I took control of, the game always seemed to come down to clearing waves of alien attack ships, and they can come in all different shapes and sizes. There are lumbering saucers, huge bombers, gargantuan mother ships, and swarms of sleek and nimble fighters. Thankfully, there’s a radar display to keep track of enemy threats and neutralize them quickly. I found prioritizing targets to be crucial when I was playing defense-style missions. And staying alive is pretty damn important too, because when I eventually got killed, I found that the game sends me all the way back to the beginning of the current mission, making me replay all the phases to get back to where I left off. If that sounds too annoying, the game also allows the player to choose an Arcade Mode, which shit-cans the missions in favor of and lets just blowing up alien waves and racking up points for as long as possible.

As you may be aware, Incoming has been on the market for a little while now, and yes it still looks pretty damn good. While some of the larger vehicle models lean toward the simple side, the smaller ones are nicely detailed, especially the jets and helicopters. The environments are pretty large, but they’re mostly just open areas of hills and I didn’t find any of them to be memorable at all. But for me, the real draw of Incoming’s visuals was the lighting effects and the explosions. Enemy vehicles erupt into blinding shockwaves and spill pieces of debris all over the battlefield. Missile contrails fill the air, and nearly every weapon in the game casts accurate lighting effects on the surroundings. Plus, the game can track quite a few vehicles at once without a lot of slowdown.

For me, Incoming is a guilty pleasure. It’s pretty shallow, but at the same time, it’s loads of fun to play. The turret missions reminded me a lot of Beachhead, which was some pretty good, dumb fun in its day. Similarly, Incoming is not something I can sit and play for hours on end, but rather something I’ll likely pop in when I’ve got an itchy trigger finger and twenty minutes to kill. Unfortunately, Rage decided to bring this one out for the Dreamcast’s launch and with a $50 price point, it likely got overlooked for games like Sonic Adventure and Soul Calibur. The generic cover art probably didn’t help much either. Either way, the game didn’t sell well, and I’m proof positive, because I just picked it up myself at a rather deep discount.

SEGA Dreamcast: Expendable

There are some types of games that seem to have fallen by the wayside and the arcade-style run-and-gun shooter is certainly one of them. Despite a number of ham-handed attempts to bring the thumb-busting 2D genre into the 3D realm, I’m still waiting for a truly good modern treatment. And here comes Expendable. Heavily influenced by games like Commando or Ikari Warriors, this is a sci-fi based run-and-gun game that’s pretty middle of the road when it comes to quality, but is definitely worth a look because it’s currently the only one of it’s kind on the Dreamcast.

Like Ikari Warriors, Expendables plays from a top-down perspective, more or less, where you run through the levels and shoot everything that moves. And even everything that doesn’t. You kill enemies, you grab power-ups and different types of weapons, and if you’re lucky you have a friend along in tow to do it all in the two-player mode. In a nutshell, that’s Expendable, all dressed up in a 3D engine with a few dynamic camera angles thrown in to keep things interesting.

Unfortunately, the control here could have been a wee bit tighter. The analog stick feels a little loose, while the D-pad isn’t precise enough. The result is that lining up shots can be difficult. Thankfully, the game does offer the ability to lock in your direction and strafe, by holding in the right trigger. This helps a lot, but it’s also a bit clumsy. I spend virtually the entire game with the strafe button held down, lifting it only when I need to refocus my fire in another direction. By the time I’m done with a game, my right index finger feels like it’s going to cramp up and fall off.

On the plus side, Expendable is quite a looker. Every level of the game trumpets across the screen with sharp resolution, crisp textures, and retina-dazzling pyrotechnics, all accompanied by thunderous explosions capable of rattling your walls. Granted, there isn’t a whole lot of variety to the levels and the background colors are mostly muted and gray, but it makes for a fine canvas to show off the vibrant death rays, beams of destruction, and combustion that litters the screen at any given moment. I also liked the way your player’s portrait slowly transforms into a skull as he takes damage. The only real issue I had with the visuals was the game seemed overly dark until I tweaked the settings and turned up the brightness.

Expendable is far from a great game, but I do enjoy playing it a lot, even with the clunky control. Maybe that’s partly because I’m so starved for these kinds of games. It can be sloppy and frustrating, and actually physically painful to play, but I find myself coming back to it over and over again.

Graphics: Eye candy galore! Crisp resolution, sharp textures and sizzling explosions. 

Audio: Ass-rock and wall-rattling explosions. What more could you want in an arcade shooter?

Control: Start exercising your right index finger, because you’re going to need it for that straif trigger. Seriously, this game should control better.

Overall Value: I damn well got my money’s worth out of this game. You may not.