Taito and Sega's Mega Drive, in the 90s, had an interesting relationship. OK, sure, the Mega Drive has one of the better versions of Rainbow Islands (and the only one I'm aware of that includes the 'extra' version) and the conversion of The New Zealand Story is a pretty interesting tidbit, seeing as it uses alternate level maps, but just look at their other coin-op conversions... Stuff like ThunderFox, which is awful (albeit in an Altered Beast kind of way, the type you can sort of enjoy if you're willing to punish yourself), Rastan Saga II, which is a blight against the good name of Rastan (I hear he's a barbarian who dared to challenge) and Growl, which is a terrible version of one of my guilty pleasures.

So anyway, I'm exagerrating a little, I guess, since they did do a port of Sagaia/Darius II and an original game called Saint Sword that's not utterly terrible, but my point remains- they picked some very strange stuff to convert to Sega's console. In fact, one of the strangest choices was one of their more obscure arcade releases...


That game was Insector X, which I've kindly pictured above. Released in 1989, it's a relatively little-known scrolling shoot-em-up with mostly cutesy visuals that make the game delightfully daft and silly. No real gimmicks here, aside from a sub-weapon system I'll talk about later, it's an all-out shoot-a-thon, with you as the brave Yanmer (who, for some reason, wears a little propeller-head hat despite having wings) fighting various bad insects. It's also pretty solid, with a lot of cheap shots, much like every late 80s shooter, and has an affinity with Fantasy Zone in this regard- they're not alike at all in terms of gameplay, but they're both cute shooters that seem hell-bent on your horrible, firey death. The punishing difficulty is a little off-putting, if I'm honest, and the aforementioned cheap deaths are almost as infuriating as those in Truxton (seriously, don't play that game if you've got blood pressure problems) but at least it's nice and vibrant, and certainly a change of pace from the space-ship shooters that were in abundance around this time in the arcades...

In any case, the game received three home conversions. The Famicom version, released only in Japan in 1989, stays relatively faithful to the original, albeit giving you the choice between a male and female Yanmer for whatever reason. More recently, the original arcade version is emulated in the Taito Legends 2 compilation pack for the PS2/Xbox/PC, which is obviously arcade perfect. Finally, to get to the point of this article, Taito converted the game to the Mega Drive in 1990, distributed by Sage's Creation in the US, Hot-B in Japan, and no-one in Europe because Taito hates us. They also saw fit to give this particular version a couple of tweaks here and there...



And by 'a couple of tweaks' I of course mean 'take out the nice vibrant colours and make it as SERIOUS and GRITTY and hardcore!'
What the hell happened here?! At first sight, it's difficult to even comprehend that this and the game I pictured a few seconds ago are actually one and the same. Why would Taito do this? If I'm allowed to go all Sherlock Holmes for a second, I deduce that, looking at Taito's other output on the system, they were trying to distance themselves from their cutesy image for the Mega Drive. Rainbow Islands and New Zealand Story aside (especially since they were only released in Japan) all of their Mega Drive releases are the less adorable, far darker Taito games, especially if we include Cadash and Ultimate Qix in this observation. Perhaps they realised that Insector X was a bit too saccharine, a little too vibrant, and decided to remake it for the Mega Drive with a little more 'sting' to its tail. Har har! Did you see that? 'sting'? Like a bee sting? A terrible insect joke already! How funny! Oh my, it's going to be another long night.

Despite the huge makeover, Insector X for the Mega Drive is actually the same game as the arcade one, essentially. There's a few changes here and there aside from the new graphics- a few new enemies have been added, a couple of sections removed- but more important is the (much-needed) change to the weapons system.



In the arcade game, you had to make a choice between anti-air sub-weapons and anti-ground sub-weapons. You picked up the blue cannister for anti-air, and the brown cannister for anti-ground, but you could only have one at a time. This is obviously a tad inconvenient, as some of the ground troops are difficult to hit with your normal weapons, but the anti-ground weapons don't do much for the hordes of enemies attacking you all the time from the air. In the Mega Drive version, however, picking up a sub-weapon cannister actually gives you both of them, and allows you to toggle between the two at will, as shown in the shot above. This is, needless to say, very handy indeed and boosts the MD game's credibility ever-so-slightly. But I'll save the rest of my handy-dandy game system notes for later on, I think, because at least one observation completely blew my mind.

So, we're going to be doing a little side-by-side comparison for this article. Just on the off-chance that you're blind, the arcade version will always be on the left, and the Mega Drive version on the right. I'll be focusing mostly on the Mega Drive one in terms of the talky bits, though, just bringing the arcade version up where appropriate. At the end, as a super ultra special bonus, I'll tell you which one is best. How judgemental of me. Anyway, shall we get on with it? Let's play Insector X!

The conflict betwixt the insects begins on the next page.