Stagger 1
Stagger 1 / Red Hawk is a 1997 vertical scrolling shooter arcade game created by Afega. Stagger 1 / Red Hawk was Afega's big breakthrough. Even though its success was mostly expressed in the spreading of bootlegs in China, Afega still claimed to have exported more than 10,000 machines. In Korea, the game was originally published before the summer vacation of 1997, but called back for some reason, and not sold again until November the same year. At first sales were slow because of the low machine price of 250,000 Won (which lead arcade owners assume low quality), but after word-of-mouth had spread, the game became a hit in its home country, too6. While it didn't bring anything new on the shmup table, Red Hawk's biggest strength was its bombastic arsenal, throwing together all kinds of weapon systems that are seen in the genre. Besides the highly upgradeable standard weapon, planes can charge for a devastating, screen filling special attack. Those don't replace smart bombs, though, as those are available, too. Finally, there's a number of sattelites to further boost fire power. All weapons are unique for each of the four different pilots, too. The game originally used an upright monitor, but for some reason some of the European releases swapped the horizontal and vertical resolution around for ordinary display orientation. This makes the game noticably harder, as enemies are seen later. In Japan, the game was distributed as Stagger I (with the upright screen resolution).
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The characters look like drawings from an eighties bootleg game, but the attract mode shows some adequate gameplay. Why not waste some change on that one?
Once familiar with the charge blast things get easier. Stagger I is not exactly bullet hell, but nonetheless requires a fair amount of dodging abilities for sure. You have a chance to memorize opponent behavior as there's not much variability, but the game will also try to fuck you up at moderate occasions. As long as you feed the machine, it will let you pick up at the exact same spot, though.
Your shot patterns are different depending on the character you pick, just like the three bombs you shouldn't hold back and go wasted as you die. You're not about to 1cc Stagger I the first instant, though it was fairly easy to finish on a budget, even for me, returning to the genre after a long hiatus from mostly horizontals like R-Type or Darius.
With my sporadic encounters at arcades and some retro collections plus my recent catching up on vertical Shmups I won't be able to tell you what pioneers exactly inspired each and every detail of Stagger I, but I can tell you quite sincerely, Afega, who appear like spezializing on Korean knock offs on first sight, ungracefully nicked a fair share of tropes and good mechanics to combine them in a game that ain't really convincing or special.
The digitized crew pictures in the credit sequence kinda underline this impression, screaming Agefa had not at all been on par with the industry, rather acting on a stale level of at least five years too late. But even that didn't prevent me from rushing into a second playthrough of Stagger I right after the first one.
Once you have collected enough power ups to rely on satellites backing you up and your shots are filling the screen to clear what a possible second player would have helped you out with, Stagger I is actually not the big deal except for the more resilient enemies. The more saddening it is, should you make a mistake and have to build again from the beginning.
Of course the futuristic military theme is nothing groundbreaking and the score hits a spot between catchy and nerve wracking, but in that introductory scenario of Stagger I or nothing, I wouldn't expect genre aficionados to be completely disappointed and casuals might not even notice in retrospect it's only a substitute. There are worse ways to spend 25 minutes, like figuring out why the hell they thought we needed cut scenes of picking up oil after every stage.