Zaku

The Good
I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of the Atari Lynx, in fact, I can’t remember why the hell I even bought one in the first place. Sure, there are a few games on it that I enjoy, but nothing that really grabs me. I still have a fondness for it, and I still purchase games for it every once and a while, hoping that one day, lightning will strike and I’ll fall madly in love with one. Well, it seems that day has arrived because Zaku has been released, albeit, about a decade and a half too late to save the Lynx in the handheld market.

Zaku is a brand new game for the Atari Lynx. Developed by PenguiNet’s Osman Celimli and published by Super Fighter Team. Zaku is a homebrewed, auto-scrolling, shoot em’ up in the same vein as Air Zonk. Despite being homebrew, it was given a production similar to an actual commercial release. In fact, it was even created using an actual Lynx development kit. It comes on an authentic-looking Lynx cartridge packed in an authentic-looking Lynx box with an authentic-looking instruction manual, and that’s all well and good, but I’m really not here to review the packaging. Every game comes in a friggin’ box so it seems unfair to praise a game for its packaging, even if it is homebrew. Still it’s worth noting.

Zaku is actually quite the throwback to the early nineties. Even the main character looks like she might have existed during the anthropomorphic mascot heydays. The graphics are colourful and cartoony, the developer makes boasts of parallax scrolling, and there’s even an absolutely arbitrary score counter. Everything feels authentically retro without coming across as an attempt to be “retro-cool”. It’s just clean, challenging fun.

What I really love about Zaku is its enormous quantity of boss battles. I love boss battles. If you share my love, then this game certainly delivers. There is, at the very least, three bosses (not counting secondary forms) per stage, with the final stage being comprised entirely out of consecutive boss encounters and none of them are repeats. Some of the bosses feel quite similar, but there’s enough variation in them to feel original. Many of the designs are very creative. Some of my favourite stand-out boss battles are; a fish in business attire, a toaster that fires croutons at you, and a computer program that mass produces boss characters.

I find Zaku’s plot to be quite pleasing. It’s an amusing tale; an evil game developer has gotten its hands on prototype development software and is using it to flood the market with games of questionable quality. It’s up to Zaku to retrieve the software and all the copies of it. It may be a dig at large corporate publishers, but it’s presented in a very harmless and amusing fashion and doesn’t strike me as overly pretentious. During gameplay, the plot is barely there, which is quite appropriate for a vertical shooter. Despite that, what really got me was the game’s conclusion which is absolutely sublime. Without giving anything away, I think it’s entirely worth playing through the game just to see it wrap up.

The Bad
Zaku is a clean game, in fact, it might be too clean. There are no real power-ups, nor is there a lot of action on screen. Enemies will often fly at you no more than two at a time, and projectiles aren’t as frequent as in many shoot em’ ups. Although this suits the Lynx’s small, blurry screen quite well, it also means the game loses the franticness found in most of its genre brethren. Furthermore, most of the areas between bosses are incredibly simple and the only time you’ll find yourself losing lives is at the bosses themselves. This makes a lot of the areas in the game feel merely like transitional sections, with the real meat being in the boss battles.

The difficulty in Zaku could easily be described as inconsistent, which isn’t that big of a surprise since it allows you to pick the order in which you attack the levels. However, this doesn’t excuse it from having a level boss that is easier to defeat than the sub-boss of that level. Even the last level ramps up in difficulty until it’s Lynx-crushingly challenging, before plummeting to a final piss-easy end boss. This isn’t helped by the fact that some bosses employ attacks that can only be avoided with prior knowledge, while others follow an attack pattern so predictable that it’s almost embarrassing to get hit by them.

Like many scrolling shooters, Zaku is a really short game. It is entirely possible to finish the game in well under two hours. Although this is painfully brief, I would like to point out that the Lynx’s battery life is somewhere between three and six hours and this game doesn’t have a save or password system. I’m not sure it would be worth it to extend the life of the game past the system’s battery life. It helps that Zaku is a very challenging game, and it’s possible that you won’t complete it on your first attempt, which extends gameplay. Still, another level or two would have really brought the whole game up.

Although Zaku’s framerate stays stable for most of the game, there are times when the game slows down. Often times it’s very slight, which wouldn’t normally be of any concern, but it seems that the sound for Zaku’s charge shot doesn’t slow down with the game. This isn’t a huge issue, but it can throw off your rhythm of charge-fire-charge-fire. To compound this problem, only a fully charge shot can be released. If you release the button before your shot is fully charged, nothing happens. This is particularly problematic during the final boss encounter.

Lastly, I find it worth noting that Zaku takes a lot from Air Zonk. Zaku does stand as a game of its own, but it’s so steeped in Air Zonk’s influence that it approaches the realm of rip off. Sure, it brings its own ideas to the table, and it’s much more simplified, but it really walks the inspired/imitated line a bit too closely. The most annoying similarity between the two is the use of rocket boots as a backwards-firing weapon. Come on, Zaku. That’s Zonk’s thing. Okay, so it’s likely meant as an homage, and not an attempt to feed off of someone else’s creativity. One of the main enemies of the game is named Iremsha after all (get it? Irem Software, makers of the R-type series?), but it still bothers me.

The Bottom Line
Homebrew games aren’t anything new, but out of all that I’ve played, Zaku is something special. It accurately captures the essence of early nineties games and is probably the best scrolling shoot em’ up I’ve ever played on a handheld. Okay, so maybe it cheated a bit off of another game’s paper to achieve this, but I still feel that a lot of love has gone into the end product. It’s entirely worth checking out if you’re a Lynx owner, especially if you’re unsatisfied with what the handheld offers right now. Overall, Zaku is an OUTSTANDING game. I’m not sure what Penguinet is planning next, but I do hope their next release is just as impressive. How about a console sequel, huh guys?