The shoot ‘em up, or shmup, is one of the hallmark genres of retro gaming. Ever since the original Space Invaders, shmups dominated arcades in the 80s and early 90s, before they ceded ground to one-on-one fighting games. Scrolling either horizontally or vertically, your spaceship faced overwhelming odds with a compound goal of powering up your craft, avoiding showers of enemy bullets, and shooting anything that moved. My history with shmups is casual, save for a string of postmortem Dreamcast releases in the mid-late 2000s—the novelty of new releases on a dead console was compelling regardless of genre. Any interest I had in them was worn down quickly however, as one of the signatures of shmups are their brutal difficulty. But Last Resort, the NeoGeo’s earliest shmup, developed a reputation in the community for not being super difficult. Maybe I wouldn’t have too hard a time.
Oh how wrong I was…
Last Resort released at the peak of the genre’s popularity in arcades, resulting in a game that looks similar to others like it but doing whatever it can to make it stand out. Immediately what hits you when you start the game is its moodiness. Last Resort looks and sounds serious, with mesmerizing yet sober backgrounds and siren-laden music. The NeoGeo shines once again with its attention to the smallest details: every object has an over-engineered amount of animation, and the sheer number of sprites on-screen dwarfs any effort other home consoles could manage. Similar to Metal Slug and King of the Monsters, there’s always something pleasing to catch your eye in the background despite having an overwhelming playfield to also focus on. This was why you paid top dollar for an AES console, or pumped endless quarters into the MVS machine: you were getting the high-quality games you craved but wrapped in a spectacular, unmatched audiovisual package.
Your ship shoots a basic shot at first, but is quickly joined by a power-up granting an auxiliary shooting pod (colloquially referred to as an ‘option’ in these types of games.) Last Resort’s option trails behind your ship, but oriented in the opposite direction. With grace and fine movements, you can manipulate your option to shoot in any direction you choose, in tandem with your forward-facing shot. A secondary button press can lock your option in place, although it will still rotate its cannons to make those opposite shots. Holding the primary button down will charge the option, releasing it to shoot out as a highly damaging projectile. The option further acts as a shield, absorbing enemy bullets and causing contact damage to whatever it grazes. Therefore the defining hook of Last Resort is the careful manipulation and utility of your option, as only a single hit destroys your ship and sets you back at the last unmarked checkpoint you reached.
I’ll admit I had a hard time with maneuvering the option in ideal ways, as it requires split-second anticipation and no overcorrections. Not only do you need to nudge your ship ‘backwards’ to get your option where you’d like it, but you have to nudge it further however you’d like to align the cannons. In the heat of conflict, your ship’s slightest movements would reorient the option into the appropriate opposite direction, and the action on-screen will have already changed. This skill lag would inevitably slam me right into an enemy ship or stray bullet.
Last Resort consists of 5 stages, and the fixed scroll of each stage makes for a brisk playthrough. How fitting, then, that after defeating the final boss the game goes through a second loop with even harder enemy patterns. Shmups are never known for their longevity, so the game relies on repetition for your money’s worth. To fully master the game requires replaying it ad nauseam to memorize the fixed patterns and optimize your route. If this was one of my only NeoGeo carts back in the day (very possible when these games retailed for triple-digits a pop) I could see this being ‘my game’ and putting my full nose to the grindstone. Especially with the chance of later showing off my skills to bystanders at the arcade! But the honest truth is I don’t have the will for that kind of dedication. Not for this game at least.
In my sessions I managed to clear stage 3 reliably, but by stage 4 I reluctantly fell back on save states to claw my way to the end of the first loop. I know I know, I said I’d play these games straight, but there’s a point where practicing for perfection becomes bashing your head against the wall over and over. Save states ignored, the NeoGeo memory card graciously saves your stage progression, solidifying the accessory as a must-have for the system at the time. I can’t imagine any AES owner getting their full entertainment without this optional card, as the paltry default credits each game gives couldn’t possibly give anyone any decent mileage out of their runs. Only on a trail of agony will the most dedicated player clear the game without any save assistance, and that's just on Easy!
Overall, I found Last Resort to be entertaining but punishing, and if the community finds this as an easier example of the genre then I’m really in for it, aren’t I!
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