The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Gain Ground
If you like games that challenge you to think, you'll enjoy Sega's strategic overhead shooter where running and gunning will get you killed quickly.
RELEASE DATE: 1989
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Sega
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade, Genesis, TurboGrafx-16
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
Overhead action games are typically not known for being very cerebral experiences, and aside from labyrinth-style games like Gauntlet, most titles in the genre have little emphasis on anything but fighting wave after wave of bad guys. That’s one reason Sega’s Gain Ground really surprised me – what I initially wrote off as a slow-paced and clunky overhead shooter turned out to be a game that really engaged my mind and forced me to think very strategically about how I was playing. It also proved to be a game where reflexes weren’t enough to keep me out of trouble- if I waded into a battle I wasn’t equipped to win, I could count on dying, a lot. It’s sort of like playing a tower defense game where you control the creeps instead of being the player controlling the turrets.
Gain Ground is a single screen-based overhead action game where you are given a group of heroes who have to either slay all of the enemies or make their way to the exit, one at a time. If you choose the escape route, you’ll have to get all your heroes across the line, but if you can take out all of the enemies, you can end the stage early. Both strategies are valid, but some stages are better-suited to slaughter while others are really about opening up a hole in your foes’ defense and making a break for it.
What makes Gain Ground particularly interesting are two ideas. The first is that you have 20 different heroes you can utilize, and while you start with three basic heroes, there are some pretty wild ones you can recruit later on. The second is that your heroes have two attacks – a short-range multidirectional attack and a long-range power attack that is sometimes limited to only firing towards the top of the screen. In your initial party, the rifle-equipped Jonny in your initial party can shoot enemies up close, but he can also snipe from far away provided that he’s aiming north, and his shots are blocked by any terrain that gets in the way. The gun-equipped Betty has grenades that don’t have a lot of range and which can only be fired north, but which can fly over obstacles or enemies and which have some splash damage. The spear-equipped and fast-moving Ashra has limited range with all attacks, but he can rapid-fire when he’s close to enemies, but can also toss a javelin in any direction that will go over obstacles.
Among the other recruitable heroes, you’ll find characters with other weapons that include machine guns, boomerangs, magic spells, bazookas, fireballs and, my particular favorite, tornadoes. The catch is that you have to rescue them while you play and then keep them alive from stage to stage. If a player falls from taking a single hit from any enemy attack, he or she becomes a captive that has to be rescued. You can only take one captive per character per stage, so rescuing two or more means you need to leave some enemies alive until everyone’s rescued.
Over the original arcade game’s 40, things start out fairly rough and then get even tougher. By the time you make it to the end of the first round’s 10 levels and face a boss, you’re going to know if the rest of this game is for you or not. Progressing into subsequent rounds changes your setting. The first round feels like you’re in the hinterlands fighting barbarians, but the second round has more of a Roman feel to it, and the third is takes place around a medieval palace in Imperial Japan. On the console version, you also travel to a World War II setting, but the arcade game proceeds at this point to the final round, which takes you into a futuristic nightmare of robots, lasers, floating orbs and mechanical creatures and ends with facing a huge Mech and then destroying a computer called the Gain Ground System. Getting to the end is not easy, and some missions are going to be suicide missions for some of your characters by necessity – they may not have the right skills to proceed, but may be needed to clear out the enemies who are in another character’s way.
Gain Ground is interesting in that it can be played cooperatively with up to three players in the arcade or two players in the console version. This adds some interesting variety to the game and allows you and your companions to create on-the-fly strategies for dealing with challenges. Unfortunately, the game also has a rather onerous timer that makes the more populated stages difficult. You’ve got to have a good sense of what’s going on with each stage – and how your characters can counter the traps ahead - or you’re going to get killed often. That so many characters move slowly and can’t maneuver around enemy fire very capably means you often have to pick off enemies one by one or use long-range characters to weaken enemy forces before you go charging in.
Playing Gain Ground legally today isn’t too hard; you can purchase it on the Switch through the Sega Ages line (which even has a great modernized manual!) or you can play the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive version on the Sega Genesis Classics compilation on PC, PlayStation 4, Switch or Xbox One, though this version doesn’t look as nice as the arcade one and is tougher overall. The Sega Master System also had a port which is pretty faithful despite having downgraded graphics, and the PC Engine CD version is nearly arcade perfect, but Japan-only.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
Still amazing to me how many games there are that I have never heard of. Nice writeup.