General Analysis
Gunbird was Psikyo's second shoot 'em up like game. It was originally published in Japanese arcades in 1994 and released a year later for the Sega Saturn and Playstation platforms through ports published by the Japaneses company Atlus. The ports included some new features missing in the Arcade version such as a fully animated opening movie or checkpoints to save your progress.
It would not be until 2002 when the game would be published outside the Nippon country with its arrival to Europe and, a year later, to North America.
The game would be published in some other platforms like Yahoo Mobile (2002) or, the most recent ones, Playstation Network (2009) and Steam (2015).
The original game has an oficial sequel called Gunbird 2, launched in 1998, which was included in the Gunbird Special Edition for Playstation 2 in 2005.
In 2003, the American company XS Games decided to publish Gunbird for the already dying Playstation console. The game, however, would change its name to a more Americanized version and was published as Mobile Light Force.
Mobile Light Force box
The box art was changed to a completely different one with three spy girls running through explosions, which did not have any kind of relation with the original design of the characters and the game.
All the plot, including the end of the game, was fully removed and three of the playable characters (Valnus, Ash and Tetsu) were renamed as Milf 2000, Jason Last and John Suarez respectively, being the last two, the names of two XS Games employees.
Gunbird Arcade Machine
Gunbird used an Upright cabinet with a Psikyo 1st Generation arcade system board. The system board was created in 1993 and used two processors: 68EC020 + PIC16C57 and a Zilog Z80 microprocessor for the audio, as well as a YM3812 sound chip.
The cabinet used a Motorola 68020 CPU and a PIC16C57 microcontroller and had a raster resolution of 224 x 320 pixels(vertical) with 4096 colors. Since Gunbird could be played either alone or with another player, the cabinet has two controlers.
Gunbird is a Shoot 'em up game. Shoot 'em ups are games where the player controls a character that must shoot at enemies that keep appearing, in a top-view perspective, usually obtaining power-ups that improve their shooting. The first Shoot 'em up game is the known Space Invaders, which was released in 1978, even though Spacewar!, a game created in 1962 to demonstrate the power of the PDP-1 computer, can be described as a first version of what later would become a Shoot 'em up.
Space Invaders (left) and Spacewar! (right)
Gunbird resembles other games of the genre. As in Aero Fighters, the first levels are randomly chosen (both games' development team is almost the same). Also, lots of assets, such as the sprites for bullets and powerups, in Gunbird are directly taken from Psikyo's first game, Samurai Aces. These assets would be re-used again in posterior Psikyo games, like in Strikers 1945 and its sequel. Besides that, Gunbird plays like many other Shoot 'em up, as it's a game that doesn't innovate at all in terms of gameplay.
Aero Fighters (left) and Samurai Aces (right)
The game received positive reviews from the game media when it was ported to the Sega Saturn, as it became more known. It was rated at 82% and 80% in the French magazines Consoles + and Mega Force. Also, in the Japanese official Sega Saturn Magazine, it was rated at 6, 8 and 9 out of 10. When the game was re-released for the PlayStation 2 in the Gunbird Special Edition, it also got positive reviews. Retro Gamer gave the game 7/10 stars, and the online site NowGamer gave the game a score of 7.7/10. Nevertheless, the site Jeuxvideo.com was more critical with the game, and only scored it a 9/20.