Heli Fire

"Native girl dancing on island boards submarine. Extra points!"  --arcade flyer

Developer
Nintendo R&D3

Release Date
September, 1980 (Japan)


While Nintendo has spent the first half of 1980 bedding into an emerging handheld gaming space, it should not be overlooked that they were still invested in conquering the arcade. With Pong luring people from far-and-wide into seedy bars, and Space Invaders creating a minor currency crisis, the arcade was fast establishing itself as an institution of youth entertainment - one a developing electronic entertainment company could not afford to ignore.

Nintendo had, by this point, made several efforts to break into the arcade - most lead by the company's earliest electronic game designer Genyo Takeda, and with presentation handled by a young industrial designer named Shigeru Miyamoto. They range from the insanely technical video-based light gun game Wild Gunman, to the dual-stick octodirectional shooter Sheriff, to the it's-not-Space-Invaders-promise Space Fever. Some are fascinating games in their own right, both forward-thinking and enjoyable, but few demonstrate that spark of player-centric ingenuity that was driving their toy and Game & Watch divisions (Yokoi, I believe that spark was called).

The first one to release within the scope of this blog, Heli Fire, is a typical case-in-point. In spite of a title suggestive of an aerial game, Heli Fire has the player maneuver a small submarine - a combat-ready vessel that can only shoot missiles upwards. The titular helicopters are the enemy, arriving in sets of varying colour, movement pattern and speed. While shooting these down, players must avoid the rockets and depth charges raining down from above in addition to an assortment of underwater obstacles. If you take too long to dispatch a squadron of helicopters, a wave of indestructible torpedoes march across the screen to take you out. And to further up the ante, the floor of the ocean rises as the game progresses to limit your areas of safety.

I'm not always the best judge of difficulty, but to me Heli Fire felt like a classic example of a hard-as-nails quarter-eater. The onslaught is relentless, even from the start, and though the submarine moves fluidly the game leaves very little margin for error. Indeed, many times the obstacles combine to form impassible barriers - as though the game just chose to take a life away through no fault of the player's own. Another aspect that makes me cry foul is the miniscule size of the target helicopters and the razor-thin hit-box of your own missiles. So many times a shot would glance across the edge of a helicopter I desperately needed to hit. I never got to see the dancing girls.

My main issue with Heli Fire, however, would be its generic scenario - which has a distinct lack of that ineffable Nintendo touch. It feels like a game any other company could have made. In fact, another company seems to have, as Heli Fire bears quite a close similarity to Taito's Polaris - another sky/sea combat game where you control an upwards-shooting submarine. The only date I could find for Polaris gave it a November release, but with the vagueness of records from this time I'm unwilling to state definitively which company might have influenced the other. Most likely, considering the length of development time, it was neither - and simply a case of both companies following where naval combat games would logically go with improving technology.

Heli Fire is fun in small doses with distinctive colours, smooth controls, a fast pace and a brutal difficulty curve. But with no character of its own, I find it difficult to get enthused about this unmentioned piece of Nintendo canon. Nintendo may be making strides in the handheld market, but they will need to shake things up if they want to stand-out in the arcade.