A Look Back @ Detana Twinbee! and Twinbee Yahho!

The NES port of the original arcade "cute-em-up", Twinbee

Detana Twinbee / Twinbee Yahho!

Platform: Arcade (also on PSOne and PSP)

Years Released: 1991/1995

2D schmups in the 80s and 90s happen to take a serious alien-versus-the-last-vestiges-of-humanity approach as their setting. You’ll always be piloting an oddly-numbered-and-named ship packed to the gill with advanced weaponry and you’ll always be sent away all by your lonesome self, be it in a horizontal or vertical plane. Gradius, R-Type, Thunderforce: yes they’re all cool, but in some way it draws allusions to the dozens of popular bald-space-marine-with-grumpy-disposition-third-person-or-first-person-shooter games that take a sensible approach to their theme (as sensible as an alien invasion can get, anyway).

Detana Twinbee! Anime makeover overload.

Rarely once in a while does a 2D shooter wears a rainbow-coated exterior and is proud for doing so. While we have yet to see something like that for the aforementioned FPS/3rd person shooters of this generation, at least the obscure Twinbee series from Japan showed off its true colors to the 2D schmup genre populated by Bionoids and other alien races with tons of ships and armadas to spare.

How saccharine is it? Well, it doesn’t beat out Twinkle Star Sprites (which I’ll get to another time), but it revolves around you controlling a bunch of kids (a guy named Light and a pink livrea-wearing girl named Pastel) piloting robot jets with arms and legs called Twinbees. They’re tasked with saving the world from a nefarious doctor who chucks a lot of crazy-looking planes and robots with googly eyes at you. Simply put, it’s material ripped straight out from an 80s anime.

The renowned-in-Japan Twinbee series have evolved from the NES classic (to some, anyway) to a clear example on how games can benefit with the extra graphical horsepower; the 16-32 bit sprite-based pastel-happy kind of horsepower anyway. Yes, cute-em-ups were, and are still, awesome, but only if their saccharine intake and visuals are cranked to the ninth degree. Detana Twinbee! (1991) and its arcade sequel Twinbee Yahho! (1995) are textbook examples of this, showcasing flair over whatever substance they have. Somehow, it works in tandem with each other.

Twinbee Yahho! It's like an 80s anime coming to life. Vertically.

The classic mechanic of a Twinbee game is that you have bells as power-ups. Shooting a bell multiple times make it change its color from a standard yellow(which gives you extra points if collected) to either red, blue, or anything other than its original. Blue bells will give you a speed upgrade, red bells give you shield, and so forth. With this, the game becomes one part frantic shoot-em-up and another part where you’re juggling for power-ups while avoiding enemy fire.

Detana Twinbee! was the first to pop by arcades with its reinvention of the classic arcade franchise. Gone are the simple pixel graphics; with the combined efforts of Shuzilow H.A’s artwork and Michiru Yamane’s soundtrack-conducting talent (way before Castlevania: Bloodlines and Symphony of The Night), the game wowed arcade-goers looking to feed their shoot-em-up craving. No one in Japan cared that it was Twinbee NES 2.0; it looked damn good for its time and showed off a brand of its anime charm from just its Attract Mode itself. Because of this, the heroes of the game ended up on a multitude of radio dramas, OAV series, and audio pop CDs long before other franchises in videogames like Pokemon did.

Twinbee Yahho! lets you choose between four chargeable attacks: a standard big laser shot, a homing ground bomb, unlimited weak options to surround your ship, and a flurry of punching attacks from your boxing glove fists attached onto your ship. Needless to say, Yahho! was the superior one gameplay-wise because of its added mechanics in addition to looser and more flexible ship control. The short cutscenes where the characters carry on their anime-esque banter helped in the game’s popularity too. An interesting point to note: this is the last game created by Detana! staffers Shuzilow and Michiru Yamane.

I’m not sure if Singapore arcades had both Detana! Twinbee and Twinbee Yahho! in their respective heydays, but I know that I never did come across any Twinbee arcade cabinet. And yet, even when playing it on the PSP (under the Twinbee Portable pack for the PSP), I feel like I was missing out on using a joystick and playing this while feeding the machine 50 cents continuously. If you happen to find it in your local arcades, just give it a go: it’s really fun. Because lord knows if Konami decides to revitalize this franchise since they have a geriatric spy and a whip-happy leather-wearing vampire hunter to deal with.