PixlBit

Side Arms, a 1986 scolling shooter, is an interesting follow up to Section Z. Even though it came out a year later and explores some of the same ideas as Section Z, I feel that Side Arms fails in almost every way that its predecessor succeeds.

First of all the sprites in Side Arms are just too dang big. Having a humanoid character in a shmup—a dude in a mecha suit, in this case—always makes you a bigger target for the enemies to hit. Your astronaut in Section Z was upright but small enough to not be a problem, but everything in Side Arms is big and so there is not enough room to move about the screen without running into something fatal. Another frustration is that even though the game starts you exactly where you died, the moment of invinsibility is so brief that it is entirely possible to spawn into a group of enemies or bullets and die as soon as you're vulnerable again. It's also possible to move into solid objects in the scenery while invinsible and immediately die.

The enemies in Side Arms are total bullet sponges way too frequently. The worst offender is a flying snake-like creature that can only be damaged when shot in the head straight on. It follows you relentlessly around the screen, which is brutal when other enemies and bullets are flying around. The bosses are a serious letdown too. The first one seems like a decent Gradius-style boss, if a bit simplistic, but then you go on to fight the exact same boss four or five times over the course of the game and let me tell you, that wears thin quickly.

Similar to Section Z, Side Arms lets you shoot both left and right, but this time they use a separate button for each direction rather than one for shooting and one for turning. I found Section Z's approach more intuitve and the enemy placement and density in that game worked better for playing on both sides of the screen. In Side Arms I just died a lot. A lot.

While Side Arms tried some interesting ideas, they were mostly things that had been done better a year before. While there was an upgrade system that let you swap between weapons, I was never alive long enough to really get a feel for it. Side Arms: Hyper Dyne is a game that became more of a chore the longer I play it and I couldn't wait for it to end.