magine a little boy in the games room with his face immersed in a cabinet (a large vertical box with a screen and a control panel): with his left hand he holds a joystick, while with his right hand he presses the buttons. He is controlling a small spaceship with which he faces hordes and hordes of enemies in the most insidious levels of the projectiles themselves. We are in the ’80s and if the boy is good enough around him there will certainly be other human beings of his age who are admiring his evolutions or joking, but not too much, try to bring him bad luck to end the game and play them .
In those years the videogame culture expressed itself a coin or a token at a time, simultaneously creating social dynamics that remained indelibly impressed in those who lived them. Obviously every age has some expressive forms that determine it and that do not cancel out with the years (at the most they are replaced), ready to go back to the mind of adults every time we try to compensate for some dissatisfaction of the present. Super Hydorah by Locomalito, Gryzor87 and Abylight Studios, a revised and correct version of the freeware Hydorah (2010), is completely immersed in those atmospheres and from there, inevitably, starts again both aesthetically and mechanically.It is a shoot’em up, or shump or classic shooter that if you want, in command of a spaceship traced by the Vicius Viper of Gradius (or Nemesis outside of Japan), you have to face twenty-one levels full of enemies and, above all, references to countless other titles such as the aforementioned Gradius and Salamander (initially followed by Gradius, then become the progenitor of a mini spin-off series) both by Konami, R-Type and X-Multiply by Irem, but also Aero Blaster and Kaneko’s Heavy Unit, SNK’s Last Resort, and so on.
The graphic style itself is a pixel art inspired by the coin op released at the turn of the first and second half of the 80s, with the possibility of setting a CRT filter to recreate the feeling of the monitors used then, accompanied by music and effects sound that would not have disfigured in the above classics.
