GUNHED

Under construction

Hu-card released in 1989 on PC-Engine, GUNHED is a vertical srolling shooting game in the vein of ALESTE. The game is stamped HUDSON but it's truly COMPILE which had programmed it, at the title we can see another copyright ; the one of TOHO SUNRISE. This could mean that the game is adapted from something already existing, may be the movie Gunhed (americano-japanese) or Gunhed manga, but I can't say sure things about these speculations.

One thing for sure on the other hand, is that GUNHED is not the first opus of the famous HUDSON shooting series on NEC. NO !, SUPER STAR SOLDIER is not a sequel to GUNHED, but the sequel of STAR SOLDIER released on MSX. That belief have lived many years (almost in France), because of the HUDSON copyright in title screen, video game press was abused by these words and by some similarities inherent to the genre (it's 2 vertical shooting for sure), but the two games are really differents, and I prefer the COMPILE know-how indeed (even if I enjoyed to finish the whole SOLDIER series, my favorite one is SOLDIER BLADE).

GUNHED is truly a traditionnal COMPILE shoot'em up (look's like a SUPER ALESTE one, and all these elements which make you know that it's COMPILE game). The game, rather difficult, carry you away with a wild scrolling to a multitude of enemies and boss to shoot. The PC-Engine possibilities are very well used, a vast number of sprites, perfect scrollings, good music, admitedly in PSG but the sound team of the CARBUNCLE company know how to do (let's hear the musics of GUNHED or DEVIL CRUSH, another master piece of sound programming by COMPILE on this same game console).

In order to conclude, we can say that GUNHED do not age, it's with infinite pleasure that I will re-do the game to make screen-captures to illustrate this rubric.

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