Capcom released Vulgus in May of 1984 in Japan. It was the very first game the company ever produced. It was never released in North America. It was based on the Z80 arcade architecture. Vulgus is a vertically scrolling shooter. It's a rather primitive game even for the genre and era, but it's surprisingly fun. Tough as hell, but still fun. You control a ship with two forms of fire. Dual machine gun like bursts, and missiles that only shoot straight ahead, but destroy everything in their path. The ship can't be powered up in any way. The enemies, which are various other ship types drop extra missiles for you. You can scroll the play field to the left and right a little bit beyond the size of the screen. You can move in eight directions while eternally facing forward on the forced scrolling screen. It plays like a traditional vertical scrolling shooter mixed Galaxia's enemy formation patterns thrown in. That's where the missiles come into play. You can take out entire formations with the one shot, if you're accurate enough. The single enemies track you and follow your movement. Some of them fire at you as well. The enemies who make up the formations come on to the screen in smaller groups or alone and it's best not to kill them as to allow them to form up into the column that enable you to take them all out with one missile thereby giving you the most points. There aren't any continues. It makes the unlocking of the bonus materials for this one rather tough, as one of them is to actually finish Vulgus, on the single credit.
Son Son was released in 1984 and was Capcom's second game released in Japan. It was their first game published in North America. As with Vulgus, it was based on the Z80. Son Son is a horizontally scrolling shooter. It scrolls from left to right. You control a little guy who can move back and forth while the game scrolls. He can also jump up and down to the floors above and below him. There are six floors on the play field. On the play field are different types of food for you to collect. Collecting six small food types brings out a large food type for more points. Every so often there will be a pow symbol on the field. Collecting this turns all the enemies on screen into large food items for serious points. The enemies have various patterns and abilities. Some of them can only move along the floors. Others canjump up and down between the floors and track you. Others fly set patterns ignoring the floors. Some of them can fire at you. You don't have to worry so much as you can shoot their fire. Still others will come out and pause, locking on to you, and rushing in your direction unable to alter their course or stop. The play field scrolls for twenty mile markers. At every few markers you'll come to what amounts to a boss battle. The play field stops scrolling and a bunch of enemies will be defending a fortress. After a set amount of time the field starts scrolling again. You can also get it moving again by destroying all the enemies defending the fortress. I've managed to unlock most of the bonus materials on this one. It's really frenetic, and it's great if you can get into the zone.
Pirate Ship Higemaru was created on the Z80 arcade architecture and was published by Capcom in Japan in 1984. It was never released in North America. It was Capcom's third game to be released. Pirate Ship Higemaru is a puzzle action game. You play as a guy trying to take out all the Higemaru pirates. The play field is a deck of a ship. On the deck there are a bunch of barrels and a bunch of pirates. You can pick up the barrels and carry them around. You can toss them at approaching pirates. The barrels will knock the pirates off the ship, or they'll knock out a pirate. You need to hit the knocked out pirate again to knock him off the ship. There is a pirate who looks like the captain of the ship, and you can only knock him off the ship for a little bit of time. He respawns and is back after you each time. You can move in four directions on the deck. The barrels create maze like patterns. Picking up the barrels also allows for you to move through the maze walls. Certain barrels are flashing. You need to remove all of these barrels and collect the fish and other objets hidden within to clear the deck. You have a time limit for each deck. If you're taking too long, a couple of skull and crossbones symbols move along the outer edge of the deck, removing the outer most lane of it with each pass until they eventually close in on you. This game is surprisingly very fun. I'm really impressed with just how fun it is.
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