Midnight Resistance is a side scrolling action shooter game, developed and published by Data East on the arcades and converted by Ocean to the Sega Mega Drive, Amiga (OCS), Atari ST, CPC, ZX and C64 in 1990.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY You are a special forces soldier of the rebel organization called "Midnight Resistance". Your main enemy is Crimson Corps, a paramilitary organization run by a mad man named King Crimson. King Crimson kidnapped a valuable scientist to force him take part in his evil plans to conquer the world. This scientist happens to be your grandfather, so your mission is pretty justified if you ultimately kill everyone on sight. It's your duty as a soldier to save the world and your obligation as a grandson to help your granddad! You must buckle up, grit your teeth and get ready to confront enemy soldiers, mounted machines guns, traps, armored vehicles plus big bosses. On your way you can gain a sort of coins (they look more like keys actually) which you can use them on an armory depot and exchange them with better weapons. The world is divided into 9 levels, each one with its own big boss in the end. The gameplay is quite tough, so this game needs patience and some practice.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Sega Mega Drive version is slightly better than the other two 16bit home computers Amiga and Atari ST and it's closer to the original arcade. The graphics are OK, though the colors are a bit dark. The sprites are nicely done and the backgrounds resemble well the futuristic spirit of the game's story. The action is quite fast with no slowdowns (as on the Atari ST version for example). The sound features in-game sampled music (much like the Amiga's tune) and a wide variety of sound effects like gunfire, explosions and more.
OVERALL The game at the arcades is awesome and I actually expected more from the Mega Drive console. This conversion -and possibly the Amiga- could do better than that as their dark visuals and their high level of difficulty force this game to lose some points.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Arcades (original version)
Hardware information
Megadrive (EU) / Genesis (Jap)
CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz in PAL, 7.67 MHz in NTSC / Secondary Zilog Z80 at 3.55 MHz in PAL, 3.58 MHz in NTSC MEMORY: Main: 64Kb RAM + 8Kb / Video RAM: 64Kb / Audio RAM 8Kb GRAPHICS: VDP Chip: 256x224, 320x224, 256x240, 320x240 / 512 colors (1536 using shadow-highlight mode),64 x 9-bit words of color RAM, 4 lines of 15 colors plus transparent, allowing 61 on-screen colors / Sprites: Up to 64 on-screen, 16/20 per line, 256/320 pixels per line, per-sprite priority / Interlace Mode 1 (no increase in resolution and Mode 2 (2x vertical resolution) SOUND: Main: Yamaha YM2612 @ 7,16MHz with six FM channels, four operators each / Secondary: TI SN76489 with 4-channel PSG + 3 Sq Wave channels.