An action game on the NES?! Well I haven’t played one of these since [checks notes] last week. Hmm.
Run-and-gun games were all the rage in arcades in the late 1980s, so I guess it’s unsurprising that the market was rife with home console versions of them a few years later. This week’s game, Heavy Barrel, was one of a few such games made by Data East, a somewhat under-appreciated company that also made Bad Dudes and Burgertime. Their arcade game Karate Champ is basically the forerunner to all modern fighting games, too. Honestly, they’re pretty important.
On its surface, Heavy Barrel looks to be another straight forward, run-around-and-kill-stuff sort of game, and to a certain extent, that’s true. Across six good-sized levels, you need to kill/blow up a bunch of terrorists and their various tanks and other machines. I imagine there’s a story or something, too.
Generic as it may sound, I feel like Heavy Barrel stands out above most of its counterparts. The first, and perhaps most important, is how smoothly it runs. The game controls really well, movement feels sufficiently quick and easy, and the action moves at a very good pace. It doesn’t have as many enemies on screen as its arcade counterpart, but it can still get quite frantic at times.
Another cool thing about Heavy Barrel is its selection of interesting power-ups, and the cool method by which you obtain them. There are boxes spread throughout every level that can only be opened by keys, which are only dropped by certain enemies. There are always more boxes than keys, so you’ll need to choose wisely when opening them (from what I can tell, the boxes aren’t random, so it pays to remember where the best items are on repeated playthroughs). There are upgrades to both your grenades and guns, and you can end up with a bunch of cool stuff, including what is basically the spread gun from Contra:
In addition to those, you can also pick up pieces of the game’s title weapon. The “Heavy Barrel,” which you get immediately upon collecting all six of its parts, is a gigantic gun that fires huge, deadly projectiles, and is immediately one of my favorite video game guns. You know how when you were young, you had that dumb friend who lied about finding some secret weapon in your favorite game that killed everything in one hit? We all had that friend, I think. Anyway, Heavy Barrel literally has one, and it rules.
I really did one-shot that tank, for the record.
You know how some action games offer different guns, but it never seems like it actually matters which one you have? Heavy Barrel doesn’t have that problem, and it’s great. I appreciate a game that does a good job of making you feel like a badass, and this does that very well.
Oh, and they’re two-player co-op! Yeah!
I’m really quite relieved that Heavy Barrel dares to be measurably different (and succeeds) than its 8-bit brethren. This is a really cool game, and one that’d be a great, slightly obscure addition to any NES collection. I wouldn’t put it on the level of Contra, but it’s honestly up there.
I don’t typically dive very deeply into weird pirated versions of games (because honestly, why would I), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s a pirate version of Heavy Barrel that, for unclear reasons, swaps its main characters out with the Rescue Rangers:
Video games are weird.
Next week’s game looks really weird, and I have no idea where it came from or why I own it. Apparently it involves having a bomb strapped to you? I have no idea. Come back next week to watch me blow myself up, probably.