I was ravenously devouring horizontally scrolling Mega Drive shoot ‘em ups in the early 90s. SEGA’s 16-bit whizz-bang was well served with a smorgasbord of fast, flashy delights, offering a home experience close to what I’d been enjoying in the arcades since the mid-80s.
Amidst an armada of spaceship shooters, Gynoug (apparently pronounced (hard ‘g’) ‘ginnogg’, and also known in the US as Wings of Wor) stood out somewhat.
Instead of a sleek fighter craft you took control of a muscular little angel dude with Icarus wings, as he battled demonic forces through a series of increasingly gnarly, bizarre and sometimes icky stages.
The levels here are quite long and you could say repetitive to some extent, repeatedly respawning a relatively small set of enemies and patterns in various combinations, as you gather power-up orbs and secondary weapon pickups to aid your progress towards memorable and imaginative mid and end of level bosses.
There’s no RNG in play here; this is a game that you can learn. Anticipation and positioning are more important than ‘twitch’ reactions or elite levels of hand-eye coordination. That said, the relatively gentle opening couple of levels soon give way to a mounting challenge and some near ‘danmaku’ moments later on.
Ratalaika Games, in association with Akihabara’s Shinyuden, swiftly follows up its welcome release of Gleylancer on modern platforms with a similarly slick and sensibly priced package for Gynoug.
Encased within the same simple and unobtrusive yet functional wrapper (extra kudos for the comprehensive CRT filter options) as Gleylancer. The now expected rewind and save state features are also present and correct and the emulation – to me, from memory – seems solid.
As with Gleylancer, the game doesn’t seem to suffer from the same wooliness as some lesser emulations, with no ruinous visual shortcomings or significant audio lag.
In terms of input latency, I neither have the tools nor the expertise to measure this scientifically, but by feel alone I would say that this is neither best in class nor one of the worst offenders. In a direct comparison to playing on original hardware plugged into a CRT TV you would probably notice a difference in responsiveness, but for most players it’s unlikely to be crippling.
In short, this is the same visually striking and challenging shmup that the likes of Mean Machines and MegaTech raved about 30 years ago – but on your current gaming platform and with some contemporary ‘quality of life’ features – for around a fiver.
Well worth adding to your library in my opinion, and I can’t wait to see what other vintage titles Ratalaika has lined up in this series.
We were provided with a download code for the Xbox version of Gynoug by the game’s PR.
Gynoug is available now for Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series for around £5 (or your local equivalent) on digital stores.
