How many Capcom games can I review in a row? The apparent answer is four so far at least. Mercs was a game that I remember playing at the local bowling alley when I was a wee lad. My father and I would go to this bowling alley and just hang out, but mostly I would dominate Samurai Showdown, Operation Thunderbolt, NBA Jam T.E. and even World Heroes, but more often than not I would always turn back to the game Mercs. Mercs was released in April of 1990, in the arcades, and then eventually saw a port to the Sega Genesis and this year made its appearance onto the Wii’s virtual console.
Turtle Killer….sounds like a sweet 80′s metal thrash band. Also note how cool all these bad-asses look.
The story behind this game is very simple, the President has been kidnapped by some random assholes from the African country of Zutula. You get to be one of three men, that will dominate the lands of Africa and those men are: Joseph Gibson (blue), Howard Powell (red), and Thomas Clarke (Yellow), and you do not get to choose who you are. It makes you one of these fine soldiers based on which player you are so the math goes as follows…1=blue, 2=red, 3= yellow, pretty simple. You are part of a three man wrecking crew given the codename “Wolf Force”, and you must get the president away from danger at the Hercules Transport area. The game only consists of 6 stages but each stage is amazing, even if the first one is seriously only about 1 minute and 10 seconds long if you actually know what you are doing.
Seriously, this man is the epitomy of cool, he was made the leader of a special task force and told them to shove it up their asses so he could form his own group, that right there is getting work done people.
While playing this game you will realize that you have two buttons you can press. One is to shoot, the other is to use your “Megacrush” which is a bomb that kills all enemies on screen with the exception of the bosses. It will damage them, just not an instant kill like with everything else.The good thing about this game is that most enemies die after getting hit once, like Contra but the good part about this game is that you actually have a life bar unlike Contra but there are a few bullshit things that can kill you in one hit such as you getting electrocuted. In this game you fight in a bunch of different areas, such as a jungle, a dessert and a city, a swamp, an airfield and even on a train type of thing. The guns in this game range from terrible, to over the top awesome. I mean you start with a standard gun and thank god you can upgrade any weapon by walking up to the upgrade item. This can make even the terrible guns awesome, and honestly most the guns don’t suck but if you aren’t using the green spreader gun, then you better have the flamethrower. When you have the flamethrower you never have to let go of the fire button to keep tapping, and when it’s maxed out it can take up like 65% of the area you are aiming at. It also tears through even the hardest bosses in no time, and is just simply the best weapon, honestly the only weapon better in a shoot’em up is probably the shotgun from the series Metal Slug. The biggest downside to the final level is that all you have to do is shoot a damn Airplane before it takes off and if you fail at that you pretty much fail at life….it is so easy.
As you can see the first player has died since it says game over….and yes those blue flames will rape your energy meter.
Ok when it comes down to it, unless you are playing this on MAME or in the Arcade you will be fucked. On the Sega this game is relentless, like seriously I think I have got to level three a handful of times and that’s playing the arcade mode on the Genesis. They did have an original mode on the Genesis which was where you could play as different soldiers going through different stages the only problem is that you had to buy the Megacrushes and food, and you even had to buy our upgrades. Depending on which soldier you chose that gave you a certain weapon, aka no soldier can hold more than one weapon so if you choose the asshole with the worst gun you might as well kill him off so you can continue with one of the other guys you can choose from. If you are playing in the arcade there are certain areas in stages where you can die probably 4 times in less than 20 seconds. To sum it up you better have a shit ton of quarters or tokens because you will need them constantly. I swear to you I never beat the game until I finally got it on the Capcom Classic Collection Volume 1, back in 1995. I swear it was the first game I played and I did not stop until I did what I could not do as a child. The graphics for this game are absolutely wonderful, and the sound once again is nothing short of classic Capcom. The weird thing is that this game did not get a port on the SNES which is insane figuring they are normally better than the Genesis with music…but every single song is a damn good recreation of the arcade music which is amazing. This game is one of the most fun experiences that Capcom has ever provided in my opinion. In the 90′s they kicked so much ass. I mean do not get me wrong they still do the right things sometimes but can still produce an aborition or two (Bionic Commando remake for example.). Overall if you ever get a chance to play, or even have the oppertunity to look it up online and get a glimpse of why this game is full of awesome, do your self a favor and do it.
This is the original mode I talked about, and yes you are using your awards of valor to pay for items such as spinach and megacrushes. I wonder how many medals you have to get to pay for a 360.
