Games of the Abstract: Captain Tomaday (1999)

 

Developer: Visco

Publisher: Visco

One to Two Players

Arcade [Neo Geo MVS] / Sega Dreamcast

 

It is amazing Captain Tomaday was a 1999 release, as whilst vertical shooters from the likes of CAVE came into the Millennium as cult titles, and "cute-em-ups" were still being made into the late nineties, where you realise cute aesthetics in Japanese videogames can be for adults and still be tough to beat, Tomaday feels like an early nineties game out of time. Maybe this is just me, but particularly with an art style which is close to a child's drawing at times, a really good one and said as a compliment, it does not have the elaborate art style particularly in shading and detail for what is a very odd little world onscreen, looking even older than even some of the later Parodius sequels from Konami which were insanely ambitious with their art styles.

What this also is was a Neo Geo MVS release, Visco a regular collaborator who developed a lot of games for SNK's system, a ROM cartridge based machine which was an arcade machine you could change the game within with ease, and later the Advanced Entertainment System (AES), which was available to buy as one of the most expensive consoles ever released in 1991, able to actually buy similar ROM cartridges as for the arcade machines and play them in the console itself. One of the later games for the MVS, it was likely damned for how far in the history of the hardware it was and, for obvious reasons, because SNK's own work dominated their own machinery. A shame as, in the midst of their titles like King of Fighters, Captain Tomaday brings a quainter form of cuteness, envisioning Earth being attacked by eggplant aliens, with the one hero to save us being a tomato accidentally dropped into an experiment and off to fly into space to fight them.

Captain Tomaday is literally about a sentient tomato, as cute as that sounds, and from here you have a vertical shoot-em-up where with a lot of robot enemies, and some stranger folks like floating skulls or sentient toast with faces welding knives and forks, all of which you will go through in what is still a challenging game. With a career that did go into console games but were focused on the arcades especially, Visco with this to their fighting games come to this where they clearly let themselves indulge for fun but without losing the challenge, where having to gun through a weird menagerie of characters even the cherubs are likely to own you if you cannot dodge their bullets. With the tropes standard to countless genres, from going underwater, Captain Tomaday is less "weird" than quirky, and its charm comes from this whilst never really going for anything eyebrow raising or bizarre like Parodius did. This does not really change up the game play style either in terms of the level designs or challenges, barring the short level designed for yourself to hover up as many bonus items on masses as a short change of pace.

The bonuses are traditional points or weapon upgrades, the latter where Tomday's more idiosyncratic touches do appear instead. Our cute little tomato, who has goofy animated segments in-between levels such as fighting an octopus, is a tougher protagonist as they do not need a gun, only to fly in space and use their fists to punch things. That is some pretty tough grocery produce, but it means you use two fire buttons, one for the left fist and the other for the right, which is one of Tomaday's biggest differences as a shoot-em-up as a result. It can be a frustration if you are used to the growing habit in later "bullet hell" games of continuous rapid fire, as the fists need to return back to you when thrown out, but with the ability to vary your shots or double punch at once, it is still inventive. The power ups turn you into a smaller nippy flyweight, or a beefy tank with roundhouses a Super Heavyweight would be proud of, but this comes with another eccentricity in that, depending on the combination, when you are hit with certain power ups, rather than losing a life, you get another chance but are turned into something else. This can vary from a baby, which is pretty useless as you have a slow normal fire of toys and objects being thrown ahead, but also can have really useful results if, say, you become a lizard, with an extending tongue of death which clears through the screen. Add to this the duplication power up, if you get it, to have two Tomadays, which is effectively a shield to that the shot too if hit, and Captain Tomaday has a strategy even if the screen can be too chaotic to get to them without risks, only helped by the fact you can punch any bonus or power up back up screen to try to catch it again.

It is an obscure game, and tragically Visco themselves focusing on the likes of slot machines and horse racing betting games¹, and away from their more genre based arcade games when they worked with SNK, which is a shame but really evident to what the industry must have been that forced them into this direction to survive. To their credit however, their games have been made available even if a Captain Tomaday is probably more known for MAME emulation, be it their Breaker 2D fighters being relicensed in the West for Steam release, or that Tomaday itself managed to get a Sega Dreamcast release in 2019 as a retro limited edition release². Visco were a steady hand for SNK's Neo Geo MVS with their career, even if they deal in some console work, very much an arcade developer whose venture here with Captain Tomady was a whim they wished to entertain and with credibility making something fun.

 

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1) Visco's website. [Japanese only]

2) The Captain Tomaday Dreamcast release, with a confirmation of its date of release.