WORDS BY WILL FREEMAN

IN BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO SOME OF THE SHOOTER GENRE’S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS, JAPANESE STUDIO M2 HAS EQUALLY SET A STUNNING NEW STANDARD FOR WHAT A MODERN PORT CAN BE. BUT WHAT GOES INTO AN M2 SHOTTRIGGERS RELEASE?

[PlayStation 4] Across the M2 ShotTriggers release, the care, respect, and affection for the source games is vividly evident in the quality of the ports.

[PlayStation 4] Those bullet patterns might look impossible, but thanks to M2’s wonderful Beginner modes, you’ll soon find yourself outplaying your own expectations.

Arcades used to confidently stand as the place to go to see the newest and greatest games before they made their way to consoles.

Amusement centres across the world were destinations players would head to to taste the medium’s cutting edge. In time, the console ports would come, but they were by default considered inferior to the original coin-op releases. After all, from the Seventies through well into the Nineties, arcade machines capably outperformed their console cousins when it came to pure technological muscle.

It was a time when eager publishers would assert the ‘arcade accuracy’ of their home releases, but the promise was too often not quite met by reality; consoles simply lacked the chops to deliver what an arcade board could bring. As such, over time an assumption emerged that ports are lesser works by default.

Recently, however, some have shown that with hard work and a lot of craft, ports can bring remarkable quality, even exceeding the standards set by their source material.

''WE ALSO THINK ABOUT THE PART WE PLAY IN PASSING DOWN A SPECIFIC CULTURE”

MASAYUKI FUKUI

You only have to look to the Japanese development studio, publisher and porting powerhouse M2 to see that quality ports are much more than just possible. With its highly regarded M2 ShotTriggers imprint in particular, which debuted some eight years ago with Battle Garegga Rev.2016, the team have demonstrated that console ports of the very best classic arcade shooting games can not just equal, but even trump their source material. The range brings something of a focus on danmaku (bullet hell), which M2 believes is particularly important to the form’s forward journey. “I think that danmaku games played an important role in the history of STGs, in that they revitalised the genre that had fallen out of public favour in the Nineties,” offers M2 ShotTriggers director Kazuki Kubota. “Although it’s hard not to focus on their high difficulty level when we talk about danmaku, we must also recognise that the spectacular visuals created by the bullet patterns helped STGs in winning back the attention of the arcade crowd. As such, I consider it an essential part of the STG genre today; though that’s not to discount the importance of non-danmaku STGs in any way, of course.”

Danmaku or otherwise, it is fair to say M2 had mastered porting long before it turned its attention to some of the most celebrated works by influential shooter studios such as CAVE, Raizing (now known as Eighting), Toaplan (its properties are currently handled by Tatsujin) and Compile.

If the M2 name rings a bell, it might be because you’ve played one of the company’s superb Sega Ages remakes, or one of its classic ports for the Wii’s virtual console, or put some time into an entry in the 3D Classics series, which brought esteemed vintage games with new features and stereoscopic 3D flourishes to Nintendo’s 3DS. You may even own one of the Mega Drive Minis that M2 was involved with.

As well as being an M2 ShotTriggers planner and programmer, Masayuki Fukui has a passion for sharing shooting games as a cultural artefact.

M2 ShotTriggers director Kazuki Kubota can still feel nervous when sharing new M2 modes and features with a game’s original designers.

Simply put, M2 has put decades into refining its porting process since the Abiko-based team was established in 1991. M2’s staff have also worked on several original games too, including Gradius ReBirth and Contra ReBirth, both of which carefully modernised celebrated arcade series for the WiiWare platform.