Fully powered-up and looking
for something to shoot at..

V-Five aka Grindstormer (1993)
Slap Fight's semi-sequel

Toaplan's Slap Fight is an underrated hybrid of Xevious and Gradius, and one of the company's more forgiving shmups..

Reviewed by Randorama

As a kid with a lot of time in my hands I liked a lot shmups, as they allowed me to play for hours on a credit. Slap Fight is one of them. While graphically speaking there are better games from that period, Slap Fight is an excellent title. From a technical point of view though, it would have been better if the designers had fixed a few things. Let's cover the cons first: bullets are in the "hard-to-see" range to exponential levels. Most players will really need some time to get used to their appearance, as they're basically small white balls floating around the screen. However, practice can cure this problem. Other issues of visibility cover the ship itself when it's powered-up: when you trigger the side pods (mmm.. side pods.. Mike), their borders are a bit tricky to be clearly seen, and it will be easy to quickly lose them. Finally, when you trigger the invicibility feature, you have to ignore the shining animation and mind only the specific sound effect, as it will stop completely once you're again vulnerable. Except for these flaws, the game is still very nice, with a decent mix of design ideas and a funky final boss. Special mention goes to the palette and the overall "metallic effects", very cute.

1986 was the time of simple sound effects and beeps mixed together to create music: in this regard, some games where clearly ahead of their time, like Salamander or Side Arms (and their groovy OSTs), but Slap Fight was just a 8-bit game, after all. However, it has the much nice virtue of having good themes, well done sound effects and being everything but "invasive to the ear". There is nothing too detailed to say about it, except that quality is overall good and tunes are quite hummable

The key aspect of these early games, to be honest, is gameplay. Slap Fight was basically a clone of Gradius in 'Tate' (vertical mode) with some cool additions. For instance, you can choose between bomb, missile and laser, aside from the main shot, and have quite different attacks. Bomb and missile don't shoot continuous streams of bullets but single salvos, while the laser is meant to be used in a semi-automatic way (i.e. tap and hold for one stream). They also trigger different scoring opportunities: bombs could destroy secret bonus pods (but not reveal them), missiles also make them appear, while laser could "grow up" flowers in key spots (an homage is in DoDonPachi which features the same mechanic). Also, Laser allows you to shoot the secret Invader enemy at stage 4. Not only that, but some enemies are more prone to some attacks than others.You also have a useful side shot and pods which take the fall for you when you get hit, saving your behind. Finally, there is the invicibility feature, time-based and with the aforementioned flaw. The gameplay was pretty creative and score-centric (for the period), and aside from the invisible bullets, the game is pretty well balanced and well-paced

Many of Slap Fight's main characteristics defined the Toaplan style (minus score, sadly), and the difficulty level was challlenging without being as hard-core as some of Toaplan's other shooters of the era. Aside from the many scoring tricks, involving weapon-switch in key areas, the presence of a light rank system also warranted an increased learning pace in the game. The game's single loop is pretty short and can warrant about 20 minutes of play, so it can be also played for quick blasts. It is strange that score was more important in this early title (maybe not, as it was officially Taito), and thus it makes the game even more interesting.

Slap Fight is probably one of the best titles of the 'old school' approach. It has some nice scoring elements and a lot of possible approaches, not to mention a hard-but-fair learning curve. Beside that, it is a really nice-looking game, if seen in the proper context (and it still holds well after 20 years). While some gameplay issues are not top-notch, this is perfectly understandable, as the game itself was a pioneer (and those issues can be coped with some practice). If you want to experience some classic shmupping, this is one of the first titles you should play. Have a blast!

Randorama

Slap Fight is one of those Toaplan games that's been overshadowed in many people's memory by the likes of Truxton and Flying Shark but it's still a title I'm extremely fond of. While the aforementioned games tended to eat up my cash rather more quickly than I would have preferred due to their extreme toughness, Slap Fight was a gentler beast, and allowed time to savour the Gradius-styled bolt-on weapon power-up system (similar to Terra Cresta's) and the attractive Xevious-inspired bas-relief backgrounds. A better designed game than its semi-sequel Grindstormer aka V-Five , it's a shoot'emup most worthy of revisiting. As home versions went of particular note was the rather excellent C64 conversion by Ocean. Daft name though eh? By the way try entering 'Slap Fight' in Google image search for an amusing past-time ;) MikeB