Under Defeat Review

Sound design has been beautifully handled with sirens, radio chatter and ambient war noise floating just above the kitsch J-Shmup midi synth rock.

Your main rail gun maintains the same pitch and power from start to finish as enemies aim straight for you. Four different option ships that can be deployed for a few seconds at a time to provide the only additional firepower and choice at your disposal. Each mixes up gameplay enjoyably and is different enough from the next to provoke experimentation from the player. The Vulcan cannon, for example, spits shots at a fast rate while the Rocket punches fire into the hull of a battle ship with its single battering shot. Score attack players are encouraged to pick up a hefty bonus by only collecting options of the same type.

Customisability outside of this is limited to two simple control styles switching how pressing left and right pivots your ship on its axis. The control methods are arguably split for offensive or defensive play but, as with FPS aiming controls, you'll likely just settle into the one that feels most natural to you and get on with it.

Your helicopter also comes with equipped with a couple of smart bombs of yore to wipe the screen clean of enemies and bullets when life is one pixel too far to the left of death. This showboats the real wonder of Under Defeat. It's looks have been lovingly chiselled from the unlockable drawing board sketches and each explosion sets off chains of background touches that will delight and excite both the Dreamcast apologist and player seeking an eye-candy rush.

Predictably for a conversion of a Japanese-only Naomi arcade title from such a small indie-studio, the Dreamcast bonuses are thin on the code. Each hour you play releases an extra credit until freeplay is eventually and begrudgingly wrestled from G.Rev's RSI-riddled fingers. There's a ton of artwork to be won for those excited by such trivia but, thankfully, the weight of gameplay and sprawling levels that take dedication and learning to inch forward through, provide the strongest argument for replay.

G.Rev is the company behind 2003's horizontal shumup Border Down and the forthcoming Senko No Ronde Rev.X for Xbox 360.

There is a little slowdown, particularly before your death (although perhaps that is intentionally stylistic), but the main problem here is one of merged technology. The game comes with both vertical and horizontal view mode options (in the arcade Under Defeat plays out on a vertically orientated monitor) but for everyone that doesn't have a TV they're willing to turn on its side, horizontal mode is the only meaningful choice here. Playing on a widescreen television in horizontal mode (with the obligatory black sidebars) squashes your view on the action considerably - a problem exacerbated by the 45-degree down-view on the action. For many Tate-orientated Shmups this isn't a problem but we had some difficulty seeing exactly what we were doing when things got heated.

That alternative present mentioned earlier - the one where Dreamcast still matters - plays host to a bristling underground fan scene. This hotchpotch culture of dewy-eyed geeks turns weak-kneed at the faintest opening strains of each new Dreamcast swansong rising from their import store's pre-order php. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that: the Shmup is the most painfully malnourished of gaming's orthodox genres and so fans take what they can. But it's important to realise that the scarcity of product and competition can cause both Dreamcast believers and Shmup aficionados to overstate the quality case; after all, complaining over scraps thrown from publishers' tables might just lead to plain starvation.