Grind Stormer

PREPARE FOR A BULLET STORM

» ARCADE » 1993 » TOAPLAN

I like to think I’m pretty open in my tastes, but I haven’t always paid equal attention to certain genres, and one that I neglected for quite a while as a kid was shoot-’em-ups. I’d enjoyed games like R-type on the Master System and really loved playing Bio Hazard Battle with my dad, but general interest in the genre was fading and I never ended up with any shoot-’em-ups on my Mega Drive or Playstation. [Outrageous – Ed] As a result, I was absolutely floored when my friend James introduced me to bullet hell with Giga Wing on the Dreamcast. Games like Mars Matrix and Gunbird 2 soon taught me that this was the norm in modern shoot’em-ups, and I quickly embraced it.

What I didn’t understand was how we’d reached that point, so I started to go back and look at what I’d missed, which brought me to the lineage of Toaplan and Cave.

Grind Stormer was one of the first games I played – I’d like to say it was on the strength of the name alone, but it was also because I could potentially get the Mega Drive version. I quickly realised that would be a bad idea because it’s quite an expensive game with failure-prone cartridges, but I digress.

Playing Grind Stormer made me realise that it wasn’t a million miles away from games that I was familiar with like Truxton – also a Toaplan game – it just had more in the way of enemy fire that wasn’t directly targeted at the player. Suddenly things were a bit clearer, and I thought it was quite remarkable that the genre had started to evolve towards its modern form as early as it did. I’m really hoping that a home version of the arcade game will be released sooner rather than later, as it’s a game I’ve really grown to appreciate over the years.