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 The best thing about this shooter by Jaleco is that
it's a video game about video games. When the
young manager of a Japanese arcade discovers that one of her
coin-ops is infected with a virus, she dives right into her
work, purging the infection from within the game itself.
Assisting her are nearly a half dozen characters from Jaleco
titles you're probably not going to remember, including the
bomb-chucking pig from Butasan and the hero of the
underappreciated old-school shooter Exerion.
These obscure video game stars
storm their way through eight stages, all satirizing popular
video game trends from both the 80's and 90's. These
parodies are very silly and very Japanese, but they're also
more relevant to video game fans than the more surreal humor
in Konami's Paradious series. Any gamer worth their
quarters is bound to crack up when they find themselves flying
through the world's most generic RPG, blasting its many
cliches until finally reaching a boss, whose every move is
predicted through a series of drop-down menus. They'll
also find themselves laughing all the way through the karaoke
round, where they'll have to stop a girl from singing a
sickeningly sweet J-pop song by shooting the words right out
of her mouth!
The game itself is nothing
special... chances are that you've played a hundred and one
shooters just like it. It's very colorful, and you have
a wide selection of characters to choose from, each with their
favorite weapon borrowed from the games that, er, didn't make
them famous. Past all that, however, Game Paradise is
just another plain vanilla shooter in the vein of
Raiden. Enemies fly at you, and you shoot them. If
things get too hairy, you can clear the screen with a powerful
bomb. That's pretty much it.
It's not the gameplay that makes
Game Paradise work, however... it's the comedy. The
satire would be more effective if Jaleco's characters were as
recognizable as, say, Namco's, but nevertheless, it's still
extremely entertaining. If you're a gamer who's paid
close attention to the hobby for the past fifteen years, Game
Paradise's hilariously wacky in-jokes will put you on cloud
nine! |
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Game
Paradise
Jaleco
Vertically
Scrolling Shooter
  
Be sure to play the arranged mode
to gain access to the game's two extra stages!
The menus, all in Japanese, can be
tough to navigate, but you'll eventually find the right
options to get the game started.
Like most Saturn shooters, loading
time isn't really an issue. It only takes about five
seconds to load each round.
There was a sequel to Game
Paradise, released exclusively for the Playstation. The
sprite-based graphics were replaced with polygonal characters,
and a second player could get in on the action with a light
gun!
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