Gunbuster - a japanese arcade FPS from 1992

[Orchid87]

Made a thread about this at Doomworld but there seems almost no interest, so...

Basically this is an FPS with some rail shooter elements. Made by Taito for the arcades. And it had deathmatch mode a year BEFORE Doom!
Controls are very interesting: joystick is used for moving/strafing and the "gun" is used to aim and turn left/right which is not unlike the WASD+Mouse (or left stick/right stick on consoles) controls of the modern FPS games. Even Quake did not have this kind of controls on default!

[David J.]

I've played it in MAME and its cool indeed!

[NeoZeedeater]

I wish I encountered this twenty years ago. Japanese language arcade games weren't uncommon where I live. It's fun to play on MAME but back then with the real gun controllers I imagine it would have really stood out.

[TmEE]

That was awesome

[Chilly Willy]

They probably weren't interested over at DoomWorld because the "3D" is really only about Wolf3D level, but with even smaller "levels". What I found interesting was the 2D layers they used for the background. You could probably do something like this game on the 32X, doing the "3D" part on the 32X with the 2D layers on the MD video.

[Orchid87]

There are two reasons it is interesting: it's japanese, and it had deathmatch before Doom.

[Chilly Willy]

There are two reasons it is interesting: it's japanese, and it had deathmatch before Doom.

TONS of games had "deathmatch" before Doom. Ever played a 2D fighter? That's "deathmatch". Those crappy old boxing games? "Deathmatch". Any two player (or more) game where players went head-to-head is deathmatch, and has been around since the first games... remember Pong? Deathmatch!

[NeoZeedeater]

FPS deathmatch dates all the way back to Maze War. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War

[Guntz]

That game looks really, really fun...

[Drakon]

*bump* this is really cool looking. When I think of early deathmatch I'm reminded of metal combat falcon's revenge. To me metal combat was really the first time I experienced some kind of a "deathmatch" that involved shooting at each other. The guy controlling the mech could control how he moved and the person using the super scope would simply follow and try to shoot down the mechs shots. It wasn't 3d but it certainly had the deathmatch mode. Then again one could argue that mario kart battle mode was another form of fps deathmatching. I still way prefer playing serious battle mode in the original mario kart over any other mode.

I can see why nobody on doomworld would care about this, this has nothing to do with doom. And of course doom borrowed elements found in other games all games do that.

*edit*

history of fps games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_shooter

It's funny that the youtube vid for gunbuster is titled "ahead of its time"....no it wasn't ahead of its time gun buster's at par with the fps games of 1992.