NebulasRay and How Shmups Struggled to Stay Relevant in the Early Days of 3D Graphics and Fighting Games
The Shmuptake #11: An Arcade Cult Fave Finally Comes Home
Welcome to The Shmuptake, an occasional column about the history of the shoot ‘em up, aka the “shmup.” Here’s an introduction, and here’s an archive of every column so far.
Hamster has turned May into Namco Month for their Arcade Archives series, adding a handful of lesser known cult faves from the Pac-Man publisher to their roster of faithfully ported arcade games. Most of the best-known Namco classics—your Dig Dugs, your Mappys, your Rally-X’s—got the Arcade Archives treatment years ago, but when you’ve got a history as long and storied as Namco’s, there’s bound to be an incredibly deep reservoir of games to pull from. Case in point: Namco Month’s second release is the vertically scrolling shooter NebulasRay, a 1994 arcade release that has long been praised by shoot ‘em up fans and largely unknown by everybody else. It landed on the Switch and PlayStation 5 on May 15, and if you’re a fan of shooting everything in your path you might dig it.
Of course releasing an arcade shmup in 1994 is a bit like buying Tesla stock today: you missed the window, buddy. Fighting games had arcades in a death grip in 1994, and something like NebulasRay had no hope of breaking through in America. I personally have no memory of ever even seeing one of these things in person, and I was the rare weirdo who actively sought out non-fighting games in arcades in 1994. Fortunately it’s readily available now in what turns out to be its very first home release ever.
If you did come across NebulasRay out in the wild in 1994, its striking presentation probably stayed with you. With NebulasRay Namco used tech tricks to gimmick up the appearance of 3D graphics on hardware that couldn’t actually make 3D graphics. Basically Namco created 3D models of the game’s ships and enemies, and then turned them into two-dimensional sprites; it gives them a blocky, textured look, and if you didn’t know better (and if a comparison with the legitimate 3D graphics that had already started creeping into arcades and even some console games didn’t make it obvious) you’d probably just assume this was real 3D. Between those fake 3D ships, the multiple layers of moving backgrounds, and an incredible score by Masahiro Fukuzawa and Takayuki Ishikawa, NebulasRay feels like a kind of endpoint for the first 15 years of the shmup—the most advanced possible version of what started with Galaxian, before true 3D and polygons took over the industry and made every 2D game immediately feel quaint and out-of-date. Developed for the 32-bit Namco NB-1 hardware, NebulasRay looks like something you could’ve played on the Atari Jaguar or Sega’s ill-fated 32X add-on for the Genesis—and that’s a compliment.
It’s also really hard. Don’t expect bullet hell-level seas of projectiles, but there’s a thick, constant swarm of enemies to deal with, and they all seem to have unerring aim. Everything seems to keep picking up speed with every level, upping the ante not just through the increasing numbers of enemies and bullets you expect a shoot ‘em up to throw at you, but by constantly turning the speed dial to the right for everything except your ship. You can boost your speed through a specific power-up, although, as is often the case with shmups, if you crank your speed up too much it becomes counterproductive and hard to move with precision. Late stages add a (fairly weak) shield power-up to the mix, as if in admission of going too damn fast and getting too damn hard, but otherwise defense is entirely on you and your reflexes—whether that’s weaving between all the bullets and enemies flying your way, or dropping a well-timed bomb to wipe all those threats off the screen. And you start with only three bombs, of course, so be judicious—although those do replenish when you die or snag a bomb power-up, which is all standard shooter stuff.
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