Truxton/Tatsujin

My retro handheld has become a wonderful outlet for pick up and play. This journal does not reflect the sheer volume of games I’ve been able to experience, I play so many games and promptly forget about them. Not because they aren’t good, but because sometimes a game just needs to be an entertaining gamey thing for the 20 minutes you’re playing it. There was a tiktok floating around in author circles by a whale reader (reads 20 books/mo) who basically said If your book gave your reader several hours escape from the hellscape of our reality, you understood the assignment, and I think about that a lot.

With a lot of these old shmups, the devs understood the assignment. They are pretty fun until you die or whatever, and even the average or middle ground ones are worth giving a spin if you emulate. I have played a lot of average shmups, so many they seamlessly blend together in the brain grapes. But Truxton… Truxton I like.

This Toaplan shooter actually gets some love in the rather prickly shmup community. It’s your standard sci-fi shmup with good contrast (a must for my 67-year-old eyes). It is fun to play.... if you’re playing the right port.

For some reason, I can’t get anywhere in the TG-16 version of this game, but I really enjoy the Sega Genesis version. I went on a TG binge last year, played and discarded it as yet another too-hard-for-me-shooter and forgot all about it, then stumbled upon it again when I more recently went on my SG shmup binge, and dang if I don’t like it this time. I am playing the arcade hack by fusaru and Dauntless, and the fact those patches even exist tells you where this one sits with the community.

It turns out Bitwave recently released a PC port and the most surprising thing about this is how many patches they’ve released. It seems they’re taking the preservation and accessibility of Toaplan shooters seriously.

There is a Truxton 2 (Tatsujin Ou) which I thought was arcade-only, but in FACT it was released on a personal computer called the FM Towns as well. It’s harder than this one and I could never get MAME emulation going on my handheld so (fart noise). I used to have a proper MAME frontend setup with a vertical monitor and everything but Things Happened so IDK if I’ll ever get back around to that.