A playthrough of Namco's 1990 shoot 'em up for the Sega Genesis, Phelios.
Played through on the "advanced" level.
After the ending, at 38:25, I included all of the stage and boss descriptions that can be viewed only from the Options menu.
Phelios is seemingly one of the lesser known games that Namco ported from their System I and II arcade boards to the Sega Genesis. And like their other ports (Rolling Thunder 2, Marvel Land, Burning Force, etc.), it's very well done despite the heavy concessions made it scaling it down to the Genesis hardware.
It's a vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up with a bit of fantasy/mythology for color and flair. You play as Apollo, zipping around on a pegasus as you shoot at the bad guys with your swords... and your option pods. Yeah, and odd combination right there. You fight all sorts of monsters from Greek legend to save Artemis, the woman with laryngitis that gradually sheds her clothes while she's trapped behind a brick wall. It's all a fairly typical setup. Capcom's Legendary Wings says hello!
But there are a lot of really neat things going on in Phelios. Some of the stages - the first and third in particular have really cool background elements, and the first has a really neat sense of thematic cohesion between its enemies and the environment. The in-game presentation is really inconsistent, otherwise. Some stages are beyond dull with repetitive enemy patterns and featureless backdrops, and all of the impressive scaling effects from the arcade version are missing, but the enemy design is usually pretty cool, and the bosses are often novel interpretations of what they're meant to be based on. The music is nicely done as well. It's generally content to remain in the background, but it does feature a few memorable hooks that you'll find yourself humming the next day.
The cutscenes look great, and are probably among the most standout things to anyone who has played Phelios. Artemis shows up between each stage to encourage you, and the real kicker: garbled and unintelligible though they may be, she does so with digitized voice-overs of full sentences. There's a surprisingly amount of it included. In 1990, that was a huge deal! Also, boobs.
The gameplay itself is overall pretty good - there's nothing stand-out about it, but it's solid. You only need one button - you tap it to shoot and hold it to charge up for a larger attack - and that's it. You can pick up options, occasional weapon power-ups, and shot upgrades, and spend most of the game weaving in-and-out of waves of various baddies. Of course, following in the grand Namco tradition, it is quite difficult, no matter what the colorful, anime-inspired graphics want you to believe. Playing it on easy will only allow you to see the first four stages, and finishing on the normal level unlocks a higher difficulty. Normal is quite a stiff challenge already, but if you find the game on the easy side, rest assured, it becomes insanely demanding at the highest level.
I really like Phelios. It'll never get picked over RoboAleste or Thunderforce, and it wastes a lot of its potential, but it is a solid, old-school arcade shooter with some nice window dressing and a lot of charm. If you can get over the extreme inconsistencies in the presentation, you might just find a good time to be had in this first-gen Genesis cart. I did.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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30 сен 2024
