Monday, August 11, 2014

New PCB (kinda) - Out Zone (Toaplan, 1990)

I never did a new PCB post for this even though I got it a while back, so here's a belated one!

Out Zone is a game I absolutely love, one of the best run and gun Shmups ever and one of my favorite Toaplan games. Prices on this PCB have steadily gone up and much like Donpachi and Dodonpachi, which could be had on the cheap five years ago (still remember a Fujita price list where DP was 8900 yen and DDP was 12500 yen), it's started to climb in price as the majority of PCB's are ending up in collectors hands. 

The game is an excellent combination of old school Shmup and great run and gun with good shot types and great power ups. It's a blast zipping through each level and does not really take long to get good at. You have a ten-count bomb stock and can blast through most levels with some creative bombing and speed. 

The graphics and music are excellent for the era and get me stoked whenever I hear them! 

Autofire is pretty much a must for this one, as your hand and arm will get super sore if you are not a tapping madman. As it is, I played a few credits today waiting for my autofire PCB to come back from Zespy and made it pretty far - 6th stage I think and te first time I got there! I practice the last stage a bunch, but it looks like there are a TON of mandatory bombing spots. 

Still, I bested my old high score by quite a bit and when my autofire PCB gets here, I'll be tackling this one looking for the loop.
 

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