Detana!! TwinBee (TurboGrafx-16, 1992)

 

TwinBee is a series of Konami shooters that didn't get much attention, with the Gradius and Salamander series grabbing most of the hype. This is possibly the best game in the TwinBee series from what I've heard, and started life as an arcade game before getting a direct and accurate port to TG-16. There were other TwinBees on console before this, but none of them captured the aesthetic the series was going for until this one. Character designer Shujiro Hamakawa drew inspiration from Akira Toriyama's Dr. Slump while working on this. The soundtrack was composed by Michiru Yamane (who would go on to the Castlevania series) so that adds a lot to the game as well.

The TurboGrafx-16 is a system that didn't get much attention, with the Super NES and Sega Genesis grabbing most of the hype. I really need to spend more time with this system...if only there were reasons to that I haven't already played. This can be found on the Wii Virtual Console, and there's a two-player mode that makes the game much easier. You can do some weird and unique stuff, like have the two characters lock arms to increase their firepower (one character's controls become dominant temporarily). Not sure about playing this on modern systems; the Switch has kinda balked at Turbografx-16 and Neo Geo VC-ing last I checked.

In this game you play as TwinBee, a bug-shaped spaceship? with a cockpit, seen here firing guns into the air like Yosemite Sam.

Stuff is happening! This woman has a vision on a crystal ball. A vision that Earth is about to be invaded by dastardly aliens, probably.

First thing that jumps out: Rad pastel colors. You pilot this... robot? around and fire at both foes and clouds. You've got basic straight shots, and also bomb-lobbing that strikes ground-based targets. Basically the enemies are on two different planes. It's kind of interesting, but at the same time it's more distracting than anything else.

Clouds produce bells, which give you various weapon power ups. The most common by far is the orange bell, which just gives you points and nothing else. That bell is lazy and sloth-like.

Shots can be charged up to produce this mega fun blast that shreds through foes. Also you can get power ups that give you basically afterimage trails that also fire shots.

You can't really fill the screen with a hailstorm of shots like in the Gradius series, so the gameplay is more strategic with firing straight shots and targeted charge beams.

First boss is a giant crab-thing. The standard laser is kinda bland and boring.

It changes colors as the fight goes on, and kinda reminds me of the fight with Metroid Prime. Purple means it's vulnerable to the Wave Beam.

All the bullets our hero was firing come falling back down, killing his entire friend group.

The pink bug is Winbee, a female ship that Player 2 plays as. Not sure about the yellow and green bugs, except that they don't win any elections.

Game Over and you start the current level over again; you can only get a few of these before you start the whole game over. Losing a regular life just pops you back onto the same screen, at least. There are five levels, it looks like, so the game isn't too long and it's doable with the normal continues and some practice.

In any case, on the second go I take out Metroid Prime, and don't really have any more issues after that until the very end.

In level 2, my doppleganger ships get some sort of invis powerup. Really not clear on what the various powerups do.

The best thing to do is fly around horizontally so that your shots unleash in these long horizontal bar patterns; that covers the most screen space.

The next boss is this galleon full of cannons. I unleash charged shots, and it's all about aiming those well enough to hit a bunch of enemy weak points at once.

As the fight goes on, the airship rotates around. It's a little bit like the iconic Crusader Ship in the R-Type series.

Next level cutscene, we get a shot of Winbee's pilot. So these cute robot ships aren't sentient, they're piloted? ...why was TwinBee so much smaller than that guy?

Level 3 looks like it's right out of Mega Man 8 on the Playstation. Half-expect Tengu Man to leap out from somewhere.

The next boss is interesting because his shield-paneling can be spun around by your charged shots, allowing your attacks to get through and do damage.

This leads to a jellyfish-like probe droid right out of Empire Strikes Back.

This thing fires lightning bolts that are nearly instant and completely obliterate your character. Get past this horror, and we see something even more horrifying:

...BOTH pilots. And TwinBee has somehow gotten even smaller? How? HOW IS ANY OF THIS POSSIBLE? Does he get bigger to go into battle, or do the characters get smaller?

Look, man, I'm just happy to have found something decent to play on the Turbografx-16, something I missed from Konami no less.

Next up, a cave with waterfalls. Yep, there it is.

Next boss is this robot worm that is particularly fun to fight because each segment is attackable, and charged shots lined up right can hit it a multitude of times.

Another between-levels cutscene shows the questionably-aged pilot of WinBee prancing about. Japan! Not sure what the guy is doing in the background. Presumably, at this point TwinBee has shrunk to such proportions that he isn't visible, and you don't even want to know where he's hiding out now.

Next, I battle green beetles in some sort of world made out of detergent.

...I'm not sure what prompted playing this. Why am I here?

The final level is presumably the enemy spaceship, where all of the evil robot bees are preparing to invade Earthrealm and lather everything with neon detergent.

The final battle is easily the hardest thing in the game, and I had to just burn through my extra lives to get through it. First a bunch of tonsils fly onto the screen in these erratic circular patterns, and they're tough to dodge.

Eventually the actual boss comes down, and it's...this thing. Blast it enough, and...

...a giant brain pop out the top, like Jack in the Box. Blast that too and the fight ends. All in all, while it was the toughest fight in the game, the only reason it was particularly bad was because of the tonsils flying around. They blended in with the background and can't be destroyed, plus their flight patterns were weird enough to make them hard to dodge.

With that, the princess is saved or whatever. Now the planet won't be at the mercy of alien robot bugs and their giant tonsil minions.

After the credits, the game starts over and you can play through it a second time on a harder mode. All this does is change the final screen of the game to something else:

So, thoughts on this game? It's an odd shmup, and it's pretty clear why it didn't catch on the way Gradius and Salamander did. It's just too weird, and while the pastel visuals are appealing, the gameplay doesn't do anything new.

Konami continues to be one of my favorite developers of any era. The top 3 for me have got to be From Software, Square-Enix, Konami. That's some seriously rarified air. Well, aside from this quick TG-16 romp, I found a couple of other Konami games that I somehow completely missed out on in the past, so I'm going to check those out.