Fire Shark high score #2 - 1,252,270

I attended my first Colorado Shmup meet at Jon eXidy's place and what an arcade!

I knew his collection was massive after years of being on KLOV and Shmups, but man, it's just awesome.

When I got there, Fire Shark and Raiden DX were in the vertical cabs and I tore into both, playing the Training course in DX and going for distance in Fire Shark. Amazingly, I remembered a lot of the game from my many runs through a few years back and just kept plowing through to eventually get to 10-1 after a good dozen credits - which totally surprised me as I made it through stage 8 and 9 without ever having played them. 

I threw in the towel after my 10-1 run, partially because I was kind of monopolizing the cab and mostly because without autofire, it's a bit tiring. 

Same! Same! Same! - (ARC) high score #1

Thanks to the amazing guys over at Southtown Homebrew, I have been able to convert gunbird18's Fire Shark pcb to the very rare 1-player Japanese version, Same! Same! Same! - with his blessing of course!

The US version, Fire Shark, has no side fields and makes for a tough and slightly boring game compared to Same! Same! Same!. While I do enjoy Fire Shark, Same! Same! Same! is much, much better.

There are now side fields and different firing patterns for some of the bosses. The game plays more maniacally and is a fast, rewarding shmup. None of the music changes, but the feel of the game is very, very different.


I have been at it for the last few days and set this high score at 443,450 at area 4-9. It's harder than Fire Shark, but more enjoyable. I can see why the original Japanese Same! Same! Same! 1-player boards command 5-60,000 Japanese Yen (roughly 650 USD).

For those of you with Fire Shark pcb's - hit up Southtown for the roms. They'll run you $20 a set.

Fire Shark - Toaplan - high score #1

A while back, gunbird18 loaned me his Fire Shark pcb, a stellar and brutally difficult Toaplan title and the sequel to Sky Shark. It's super fun, but demanding and you do have to do a lot of memorizing, more so than Sky Shark.

It does not have side-fields, which is unusual for a Toaplan title, so what is on screen is all there is. Which somehow sounds like it's easier to deal with but trust me - it isn't. The enemies, popcorn or large are all very tricky and the first few time you play this game you will take a shot or to to the face when you thought you would be within distance to seal bullets from the enemy ships.

The music is very cool and it has a bit of the same feel of Sky Shark, but not as good. I only think of the stage one music when I think of this game and I cannot even remember what the later stages sound like, but maybe that's because the game gets silly hard really quick.

The difficultly lies in two places in this game - the usual shot-dodging and anticipation mechanic of most Toaplan titles and dodging unwanted power-ups. Yup - dodging power-ups.

At first, you'd think that you'd want to snag a few and change shot types, but you really only want to stick with the standard blue spread shot, a carry over from Sky Shark or the red fire laser, which is stellar for bosses. The green shot sucks and should be avoided at all costs. The problem lies in that the power ups bounce around the screen from top to bottom, side to side in an almost random pattern. Unlike Twin Cobra where the power ups stay in the middle of the screen for the most part.

The other downer is that there are a lot of power ups that appear throughout the game and in some places, there may be 5-6 item carriers and the screen quickly becomes filled with a ton of power ups. Ugh.

Besides that, the game is awesome. The ship controls like the Sky Shark ship and you get the same satisfaction of killing scads of popcorn enemies when you use the spread shot and taking down bosses are sweet tapping fests that feel like real accomplishments when you take them out.



I set this high score after bringing the pcb out again after a number of months on my first credit, finally making it past the 4th stage which had been giving me trouble earlier.

Big thanks to gunbird18 for the long term loaner!