1943: The Battle of Midway

Le jeu

1943: The Battle of Midway is a 1987 vertically scrolling shooter arcade video game developed and published by Capcom. It was the first follow-up to Capcom's earlier 1942 . Like 1942, despite the game being created by Japanese developers, 1943: The Battle of Midway (NES) it has the player-controlled Americans attacking the Japanese air fleet; this was due to being one of the first Capcom games designed with Western markets in mind. The game's name is a reference to the Battle of Midway, which occurred in June 1942. The game is set in the Pacific theater of World War II, off the coast of the Midway Atoll with the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces as the main group of antagonists. The player takes the role of an unnamed U.S. Air Force ace pilot seeking revenge to defeat the Japanese air forces that attacked the American aircraft carrier, destroy all Japanese air and sea forces, fly through the 16 stages of play, and ultimately destroy the battleship Yamato, the game's final boss. 11 of these stages consist of an air-to-sea battle (with a huge battleship or an aircraft carrier as the stage boss), while 5 stages consist of an all-aerial battle, either against a squadron of multiple strategic bombers or a single heavy bomber resembling a Nakajima G8N, the latter requires the player to shoot its four engines to destroy it. As in 1942 , players pilot a P-38 Lightning. Controls are also similar: button B fires main weapons, and button A performs two special actions: one of three special lightning attacks in exchange for some of the player's fuel, or a loop maneuver like in 1942 if buttons A and B are pressed simultaneously. Indeed, players now have only one life, in the form of a large 'fuel' meter; constantly depleting, but refillable by collecting various powerups. In 2-player mode, when both players overlap their planes on screen, the energy bar can be transferred from the player with more fuel to the player with less. Destroying a complete formation of red enemy planes will result in a power-up, such as a health boost or a new main weapon. Capcom released their own port for the NES, but the game has also been ported to the Atari ST, the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. Released exactly one year after the arcade version, the NES version of 1943 introduced the ability to improve the player's plane by permanently upgrading certain aspects of its abilities. These include the plane's offensive and defensive powers, the maximum fuel level, and its special weapons and their durations. This somewhat alters the game balance and a different tactic is required to survive the game. For example, initially very few weapons are made available; more can be attained from power-ups by putting statistic points into 'special weapons ability'.