[1cc] Tiger-Heli (JP) - 4-ALL - 981,230 pts

Tiger-Heli ( タイガーヘリ ) is the first shoot em up developed by Toaplan, released in 1985.

It's also one of the few Toaplan games featuring only ground enemies, along with Slap Fight (if I'm not forgetting something) and Daisenpuu. The only flying enemies (planes) are actually harmless for some reason and can be considered scenery. Unfortunately, bullet sealing wasn't invented back then so this won't really help you. It's actually the opposite: being on top of an enemy will allow it to aim at you immediately and snipe you. The fact that so much stuff, especially the lack of bullet sealing, is different from subsequent games is very disturbing at first.

You also have one of the worst (if not the worst) weapons in any shoot em up: very short range, pretty narrow, and only 3 sets of shots on screen at a time. Thankfully all enemies that aren't the bosses die in one hit and the enemy bullets being slow mean that you can easily move up to kill enemies. Your hitbox is also gigantic and in higher loops it's hard to go between the bullets.

The way tanks rotate turrets to aim is also different. In later games (like Hishouzame or Same! Same! Same!), they will adjust they position pretty often, but only in small increments. Which means that if they have to do a half-turn if will take them some amount of time (unless you're playing in high loops or something) since they have do go through all the intermediate states. On the other hand, if they only have to move once because you're very close to their angle, the maneuver would be done in no time and they'd shoot at you quickly. In Tiger-Heli, they adjust less often, however there are no intermediate steps and they will immediately turn to the desired position, often killing you if you're unprepared because of how slow you are. It takes a while to get used to this detail.

Like most Toaplan games, this loops infinitely, difficulty increasing with each loop (and stage), and reaching its maximum during the final stage of the third loop. As a result, the hardest loop is the 4th one (since the early stages still have lower rank at the beginning of loop 3), and if you can do a 4-ALL you can theoretically play the game infinitely if you're consistent enough (which isn't my case at the moment). The game counterstops at 9,999,990 points so that's around 40 loops to get there, and around 8 hours of play. The first stage was removed from the higher loops for some reason.

The "power-up" system is kinda interesting, since you get items by shooting these square things and your drop depends on the color it was when you shot. White is a heli that shoots forward, red is a heli that shoots on the side, and blue is a bomb. The red heli can be useful to take care of some stuff because there are many tanks coming from the sides, but I try not to rely on it because if it gets shot then you're in trouble if you have no backup plan. I only use it at the start of the second stage (first one in higher loops) since you can get some at the very end of the final stage without any risk of losing them. White is almost always appreciated for the additional firepower, but it's hard to keep them alive. And the bomb is cool, but it has a big delay.

A cute detail is that your number of bombs isn't shown directly on one part of the screen like you would expect, but instead your sprite changes and there are small bombs on the side of your heli. There's also an autobomb system if you get shot on the bomb's sprite (its hitbox is fairly big compared to its sprite), where you won't die but the bomb will go off. You can hold up to two bombs at a time, any bomb item you collect after that is worth 3k points. You get a full bomb refill after you die and respawn, and after you complete a stage, so don't be afraid to use them since it's sometimes the only safe way to deal with some enemy formations.

You get one extend at 50k points then every 120k, and every time you destroy 10 of those diamond things (you get 15 of them in the first loop, 12 in higher loops).

Scoring is just destroying everything, trying to end a stage with bombs of small helis (5k per bomb and/or heli remaining), and the secret cars worth 10k each. Regarding the secret cars, you get them if the total number of shots you fired when reaching a certain point is a multiple of 16. In the M2 port there a gadget showing you this counter and the invisible lines you have to cross to trigger the car. On PCB or MAME you can't really know unless you check the memory address (0xc22f for the japanese version apparently), so it's pretty much random, except for the first car which you can get if you shoot exactly once per enemy/object.

Learning this game was actually kinda hard at first since everything just looks the same and I kept getting areas mixed in my head, expecting one formation to come at a given point while it would happen later etc.

00:00 Loop 1
14:32 Loop 2
26:01 Loop 3
38:22 Loop 4
50:30 Loop 5 game over