Mark Plays 超連射68K (Cho Ren Sha) (Chourensha) Super Rapid Fire On The Sharp X68000 – trial runs

#超連射68K #X68000 #Windows #Shmup

超連射68K (Super Rapid Fire) Cho Ren Sha 68K is a 1995 vertically scrolling dōjin shoot ’em up video game developed and originally published
by Koichi “Famibe No Yosshin” Yoshida at Comiket for the Sharp X68000.

GAMEPLAY
Cho Ren Sha 68K is a vertically scrolling shoot ’em up game in which players take control of a space fighter craft to fight against a horde of enemies and bosses on a ring station. The game features a loop system where players start at the beginning of first stage after defeating the last stage boss, with each loop increasing in difficulty and enemies spawning extra bullets when destroyed (sometimes called ‘suicide bullets’ or ‘ricochet effect’).

The power-up system: There are three types of items to collect by destroying an enemy carrier, ranging from “Power-up!” (which increases the ship’s firepower up to four times), “Bomber” (which grants players another screen-clearing bomb that can be stocked up to five) and “Shield”, which gives players an extra hit and if the ship gets hit by an enemy bullet, it emits a small shockwave that clears the screen of both enemy bullets and weaker enemies. When an enemy carrier is destroyed, the power-up icons appear in a ring formation and if the players takes one of the three, the other two will disappear but all three power-up items can be obtained by staying on the center of the ring for a period of time.

The scoring system: this is based on how players destroy enemies. Once the ship is powered up, items will only give points until the ship is destroyed, with the highest value being 25600 points. Depending on the number of lives, bombs and having an active shield, players receive a determined score at the end of each stage. When players reaches one million points, the shield power-up is replaced by a 1UP icon
instead. Players have the option of either collecting the 1UP item or risk to stay within the ring formation to grab all three items at the same time, however losing the 1UP item means that it will not appear again unless another one million point threshold is reached to get another
opportunity.

RELEASE
Cho Ren Sha 68K was first released by Famibe No Yosshin as dōjin soft for the X68000 at the 1995 Comiket. On 14 August 1998, an album containing music from the title was published in Japan by Denkai Laboratory, featuring
an arranged soundtrack by various composers. Several other albums with music from the game have also been released through services such as Bandcamp.

On 12 September 2001, Cho Ren Sha 68K was later ported to Microsoft Windows as freeware. This version runs at a fixed resolution of 640×480, using 256×256 internally.The original X68000 version ran at 55 frames per second, while the Windows port runs at 60 frames per second instead,
increasing the difficulty by 9%. As the original Windows release was intended for Windows 98, playing it on modern hardware exhibits sound issues, which meant that running the game on newer hardware required
changing compatibility settings. On 20 August 2005 an update for the Windows port was released, adding a hard difficulty and fixing various software bugs from the original release. On 23 May 2017 a new update version for the Windows port was released, adding support for Windows 10, fixing minimal bugs as well as sound and compatibility issues.

LEGACY
Between 2013 and 2014, Cho Ren Sha 68K was voted into “honorable mention” status in the “Top 25 Shmups of All Time” vote on SHMUPS!’s forum. In July 2015, a homebrew conversion of the game for the Atari Falcon was released by Sascha Springer, featuring various changes compared to the original X68000 release. In 2016, a reworked port of the title for the Super Cassette Vision was announced by Japanese homebrew developer Faw.labo. System Erasure have cited the game as an
influence when developing ZeroRanger. Rival Megagun creator Justin Rempel claimed in a 2018 interview with Japanese website 4Gamer.net that Cho Ren Sha 68K is the shooting game he admire the most.

Information sources: Wikipedia, 4 Gamer.net.
Shmups.System11.org

Soundtracks: Licensed from Epidemic Sound

The native Windows 10 compatible port – which is freeware by the way – might be the most accessible for people to give a go. It does run noticeably faster than the Sharp X68000 original though (9%) and therefore has a tweaked difficulty setting.

On my 64Bit Windows 10 system I need to run it with Windows98 compatibility settings enabled as shown in the beginning of the video.

All versions are freely available from the author’s homepage:
http://www2.tky.3web.ne.jp/~yosshin/my_works/download.html