Captain Tomaday

Introduction:

VISCO is one of those companies that has never really garnered much attention, but over the years they quietly pumped out several competent games for the arcade and home consoles. Many of their games are actually quite good, such as Breakers, Neo Drift Out, and Vasara, but despite this Visco is far from a household name for casual gamers.

Captain Tomaday is VISCO's first endeavor into a shmup subgenre called cute 'em up. For the uninitiated, a cute 'em up is basically a light-hearted shooter with bright cartoony graphics that often leans heavily on satire and humor as opposed to blistering difficulty. Some of the most notable cute 'em up series are Cotton, Parodius, Air Zonk, and TwinBee.

VISCO also brought us the early Neo Geo game Andro Dunos, so surely they'll knock this one out of the park!

STORY:

The shmup genre rarely focuses on story, but it's worth pointing out that cute 'em ups commonly use cut scenes for laughs and to set the tone of the game. This subgenre often parodies shmups as a whole and the overall themes of the game and levels are important. Cute 'em ups are generally wacky, fun, and sometimes a little pervy, loaded with fun aesthetics and silly enemies.

The attract mode demo in Captain Tomaday starts out with the usual dark and stormy night trope, panning from an ominously spelled “BOTANY LABO” sign to an old dwelling perched atop the worst piece of property you have ever seen. Inside the laboratory, surrounded by jars full of ...fish bones... a tomato falls from a random plant on a desk, falling into a beaker of chemicals located on the floor. The chemicals EXPLODE and there stands the most boring character you've ever seen: Captain Tomaday!

Despite being promoted to captain within mere seconds of his existence, Tomaday is by far the least interesting character I have ever seen in a cute 'em up. He's just an anthropomorphic tomato with shoes. Did the art designer ever SEE what Air Zonk looks like? That guy has ATTITUDE!

I had to look into the story a little more, but the main mission for our freshly born person fruit, is to stop an eggplant from conquering Earth. Eggplants are funny, RIGHT? Isn't that ZANY? The tone of the game is set to stupid and the jokes continue to fall flat throughout the entire game.

Get used to this nonsense, because the game never pulls together a cohesive idea for more than 10 seconds. The very first cut scene just has Captain Tomaday sitting in a trash heap crying. That's what we call foreshadowing.

Gameplay: 🕹️

Captain Tomaday actually controls very well. The movement is tight and responsive as you would expect from a shmup. The character's speed is perfect for the game and he never feels sluggish or unresponsive. I never had any real issue dodging bullets due to lack of control.

You have two attack buttons: one for the left fist and one the right fist. Tomaday attacks his opponents by punching them right in the face! If you hold the buttons you will automatically rapid-fire, which is a nice touch not seen in that many Neo Geo shooters. If you hold down one button and not the other, you will charge a heavy punch in your dormant hand, and pressing the button on the charged fist will unleash a heavy attack. The novelty wears off pretty fast though as you quickly grow weary of holding down two fire buttons through the whole game. I can't fault VISCO for trying something new, but a typical bomb button would have been so much better.

You can collect an extra tomato for double the firepower but that just really increases your hit box to an ungodly size, guaranteeing the death of one of the tomatoes quickly. The C button will change the formation which may help you a little, but the powerup is almost worthless to begin with since you are trying to dodge bullets with two characters. It would have been a better idea if the game designers made the secondary character an invulnerable option, as we see in Paradious or Gradius.

At first glance, Captain Tomaday has a power up system reminiscent of the Twinbee series, where you juggle multicolored bells with gunfire which in turn changes the powerup the player will receive. Captain Tomaday can juggle powerups too, but it doesn't do anything at all. There's no reason to have this mechanic, as it affects nothing.

The powerups are pills for some strange reason, or maybe vitamins, but I like to assume Tomaday has a substance abuse problem which explains why we don't see the “winner's don't use drugs” message in the beginning.

One defining feature that makes shoot 'em ups so damn cool is firepower and I hate to tell you this, but the pills don't really power you up much either. You just change into another character and most of the transformations are complete garbage. The worst is definitely the uh, stick... with a ball on it? I really couldn't tell what it was. The potted plant is pretty crummy too but I hated every one of them to be honest.

To wrap up the terrible gameplay: if you take a hit you transform into a completely awful baby. Not a baby tomato, but a human baby. Figure that one out.

Graphics: 👾

To be fair, the graphics are not horrendous. In Captain Tomaday. It doesn't really compare to other classic cute 'em ups, but it's not bad looking for a game made in 1990. It's really not too far off from other games from the time period.

Wait, this game was made in 1999? Holy crap, man! That's the same year as Strikers 1945 Plus and Prehistoric Isle 2! Why does the game look like it was made a decade earlier? Needless to say, I need to correct my previous statement. This game looks like it came on a 500 in 1 PC game compilation disc you bought at K-Mart for four dollars.

Again, I have to point out that the design of the main character is extremely dull. If you were to compare the design of Tomaday to the twinbee ship or the dragon from Coryoon you'd know what I mean. Captain Tomaday looks like a character that was drawn by a middle aged dad during a therapy session.

The artwork for most of the enemies is passable, if very generic. On the other hand, the robotic bosses actually look pretty decent and their design is cool, even if they don't look like they belong in this game.

There's nothing special to see here and I feel like the designers could have pushed the Neo Geo hardware a bit more, especially when you look at the other games they had already produced. The color palette is bland, the backgrounds are dull and static, and the animation is sparse. There's no way to put it, but this game looks stupid.

Level Design:

Level design in a shoot 'em up is often subtle but critical to building a memorable experience. If you played R-Type at any point in your life I guarantee you remember at least a few moments of each stage you played. The moment to moment gameplay is well crafted and creates set pieces throughout every level and sometimes every few seconds.

The creators of Captain Tomaday take the completely opposite approach. I swear the background artist, character artist, and level designer never once had a conversation about what the hell was happening in the game. Sure, each level has a basic theme and the enemies match that for the most part, but you can definitely tell that one guy just drew a bunch of random enemies and then the level designer just dropped bad guys into the levels to fill dead space. Maybe he had somewhere better to be, like a karaoke bar, or maybe he just had to pee really bad and left work.

For example, halfway through the outer space level there are spinning cacti wearing cowboy hats. They don't belong anywhere in this game and at first I thought the designers were trying to be KOOKY but I can't really tell. The cacti feel like they had been created for a desert stage at one point and just had to drop these dudes into a level somewhere to use them.

The worst enemies are these little dragons you come across a few times who are walking in the air as if they are always placed in the wrong area of a level. They were clearly meant to be ground based enemies, but due to the random placement the animation looks extremely awkward.

None of the levels are planned very well and there are no real memorable moments. I know cute 'em up game are always nonsensical, but this is nonsensical to the point that I can't tell if the developers are really dumb or if they thought they were being really silly. Either way, VISCO failed to create a single great moment in the entire game. In fact, the most memorable part of the game is the final boss fight and I only remember that because it's the lamest end boss I have ever seen in a game.

Sound: 🔊

The soundtrack isn't half bad until you realize that most of the “songs” are just fifteen second loops—which happens to be double the amount of time anyone should ever spend playing this game.

Fun Factor:

Captain Tomaday isn't even in the “so bad it's good” category, and I'd go as far as to say that it is easily the most mundane shooter I have ever played. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this is one of the most boring games I have ever touched and I hated the game within a minute of starting the game.

This game should only be used as a punishment for kids when they get caught smoking cigarettes.

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Conclusion: 📊

At first glance, Captain Tomaday seems like an average shoot 'em up, but it lacks everything that makes the genre compelling. Don't even waste your time trying the game out in an emulator. In the end this game just sucks.

The only good thing I can say about the game is that at least it's playable and the game doesn't crash.