Reviews from

in the past


The best looking shooter at the time of its release. The Tempest inspired cylindrical shooting doesn't really add much to the gameplay beyond adding a sense of speed. Solid audio effects and music as well.

This one took some getting used to but was never too frustrating and I felt like I was doing better each time I played it. It's a tube shooter similar to Tempest but you can't really see the "tube" but you do rotate around a center point. The enemy ships can enter from any edge of the screen and swarm to the center and then start diving/shooting at the player. So similar to Galaga but you spin around the edges and shoot toward the middle instead of sticking to the bottom and shooting up. The biggest issue I had was being hit from enemy ships as that came onto the screen. I felt like they were constantly coming from behind me no matter which direction I faced. I think this was a good idea and maybe just an indicator of what's next like Tetrix has would have helped.

Early tube shooter. Actually holds up pretty nicely, but goes on for a bit too long and doesn't have enough different music tracks to keep things interesting. Either way, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Feels a bit ahead of the time for sure.

Gyruss is the lovechild of Tempest and Galaga, rather using raster than vector graphics and pretty much everything from the Namco game, but with the advantage of a tube shooter not being able to get you cornered. It's good. Play it! And that could be everything you want to know about this early Konami shooter.

When I found the remote cabinet at an arcade I will revisit next month hopefully being able to beat my old highscore, I wasn't even aware I already knew Gyruss, but it turned out I did and at first I re-experienced a feeling of alienation. The reason simply is that Gyruss seems to play like a game made for a spinner, but uses a joystick. At least that's what I thought. It turns out using a lever was intended and you'll notice once you've learned the mechanics.

Spinners, or even potentiometers, like I think the controls for old seventies games like Pong would be named more accurately, whilst later games used different optical Spinners like Arkanoid and of course Tempest, ceased to exist for a reason I can't verify. Other than companies riding the Pong train for too long going broke that is and finally often innovative Atari leading into the big western crash of 83. It might have been a maintenance issue for arcade owners.

Video games changed over time and Gyruss creator Yoshiki Okamoto might have either been aiming at a more accessible joystick technology at japanese arcades for cabinet conversions you could do between a lot of then recent Konami machines or at possible home ports not everybody wanted to buy extra peripherals for.

I also couldn't research the exact technology used in japanese Gyruss cabinets. I know the American distributor Centuri used 8-way Monroe sticks that were almost entirely made of metal, using a circular gate and leaf switches. Though some prefer to swap the Time Pilot and Gyruss sticks with the grommet based Wico sticks found in later western Konami cabinets like Crime Fighters, The Simpsons or both Turtles games, a point is made this machine might not be supposed for stock square gate Sanwa JLFs most consider the arcade standard today.

I'm probably nerding out about something the majority of players won't even be bothered with, using control pads for one of the many available emulations like a Konami Arcade Collection. Chance is though, that quite a few users will abandon Gyruss quickly before even noticing why it might play weird on their d-pad and whilst the motions might work halfway decently on an analogue thumbstick once you've figured it out, it seems to be made with the circular gate arcade lever in mind and I'm going to pick up on that later.

So I was standing at the arcade puzzled, and I will actually have to find out what joystick they used, because I simply can't remember. I can recall the increasing fascination though, once I actually moved forward in the solar system towards earth. It's maybe a long way to Tipperary, but only a few warps to Uranus when you're sharp enough.

Bad pun? You might have actually seen a bootleg Easter egg of Gyruss in GTA San Andreas under the name of They Crawled From Uranus more likely than the arcade bootleg called Venus. It's also cloned as a mini game in Contra: Legacy of War and the soundtrack was remixed for Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2.

Anyway, I got a double shot, which is a lot more fun and with the bonus stages I soon managed to set a new highscore on an almost virgin table. They either reset it or nobody's actually caring to learn Gyruss, but I scored and just went on to play other machines to legitimate the flatrate price.

I think it's hard to fully grasp the evolution of arcade's golden age video games in retrospect and even though I started early as a kid in the eighties Gyruss looks aged to me as well. That doesn't mean it's bad though and you can see the genesis of shooters quite clearly. Space Invaders however hit a nerve in 1978, especially as Star Wars just had brought Sci-Fi back into theaters.

Some games just copied the rather static cosmic warfare and others had something to add like Namco did with Galaxian and Galaga. Keep in mind Shmups as we know today had just recently been pioneered with games like Scramble and Defender in 1981 and Xevious in 1982. There was still room for improvement on the Nostromo inspired two-way phalli and their intergalactic bukkake.

What especially the latter have in common is that they are rather simple in game mechanics, looking at them today, when they'd probably run on your microwave display. But at their time, they had to overcome technical difficulties to make them playable so flawlessly precise that you can't really argue it was you, the player who made the mistake in a merciless but clear ruleset, including limitations to few shots at once, so you better be a sniper or wait til your bullet will exit the screen to fire again.

When Konami asked Yoshiki Okamoto to do a driving game, he forced his team to do a shooter anyway and that was his first game Time Pilot that became successful, so the company, instead of firing him, asked for another one leading to the creation of Gyruss. It ended in Okamoto being dumped afterwards over a raise and so he went on to create 1942 and Gun.Smoke with Capcom. He then produced titles like Final Fight and Street Fighter II. Quite a career.

So let's take a short look at Time Pilot to understand Gyruss a little better. Time Pilot starts off as both a thematic anticipation of 1942 (until you meet flying saucers) and an art style that reminded me of the 1985 TwinBee, especially when you look at the clouds. The game plays a little differently though. Your plane is centered and whilst you're forced to scroll, you can move in any direction, putting it more in the Asteroids type of family, despite there you can thrust over the screen.

Yes, that's another spinner based game transferred to 8-way joystick play and it takes some time getting used to as well. The thing with Time Pilot is, whilst the movement might actually include some realism, especially the swirling around the enemy to strike in air to air combat, it just doesn't feel natural to me, because with the nose pointed outwards from the center it's hard for me to transfer this to an outwards circular motion on the stick, when my head wants the ship to follow straight inputs based on cardinal directions.

Yoshiki Okamoto felt he had accomplished what he wanted in shooters, but the fact in Gyruss your ship is fixed on an orbital circumference pointing towards the vanishing point in the center is like an inversion of Time Pilot to the advantage your movement of the lever towards the gate is reflected in the circular motion on screen this time.

It's hard to fully enjoy the discrete audio circuit stereo sound and Masahiro Inoue's interpretation of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565", inspired from the 1980 hit rock arrangement "Toccata" by instrumentalist band Sky in a noisy arcade environment, but that's another plus of Gyruss and pavement for Konami's future strength in game soundtracks, so many steps ahead from the digital fart sounds early space shooters offered.

I couldn't care less why you have to reach Earth, but Gyruss is separated into warps between our solar system's planets and the stage counter goes up even after the set goal was achieved. It's just back to Neptune with an additional warp there and towards Earth again, so my log of completing an endless game is probably more representing the ending of a humongous session in a way beating the main objective to get this review posted in activities, because I think in other cases that doesn't happen.

Zoning into that one-point direction with stars coming at you to create the illusion of movement and dimension left me quite crossed eyed, but I enjoyed getting a lot further than before very much, even though I'm plenty of parsecs away from the world record. If you wrapped your head around the concept it's just as captivating as Galaga, because that's what it basically is.

Okamoto simply envisioned Gyruss as facing the problem of getting caught in the corners of Galaga by using the tube shooter concept of Tempest. So best think of it as Galaga folded to a cone; the straight bottom line of orientation bent around the screen to form a circle and the top becoming the vanishing point. Instead of moving left or right it becomes clockwise or counterclockwise, theoretically allowing you to spin infinitely one or the other way round.

Vectors might have been visionary for a while, but just like the movie Tron went obsolete quickly, a game like Tempest would have had to be improved with textures to stand the test of time. We can look at them with nostalgia spectacles on, but for 1983 the raster graphics used in Gyruss had been the way to go.

The enemy is swirling in formations, so it doesn't look like they're bound to the path like you are and they're a lot smaller when grouping in the back until they charge individually. You've got the luxury of three shots you can fire in quick triplets or aim more carefully to have a shot left before the others hit or leave the screen to refill your ammo.

You then have to swivel to any clock position required to erase the enemy interrupted by hostile fire and indestructible asteroids to dodge as well, leading to sheer excitement when wiggling back and forth on pure instinct to survive the assault. It's only half the fun without the double shot though, so you want the satellites to appear. Shoot the sunlike object in the middle to upgrade.

Just as Galaga of course Gyruss has bonus stages and you want to be in the correct 3, 6, 9 or 12 o'clock position to profit the most. And that's it. The Famicom Disk System/NES version might be called Gyruss, though it's actually not a port, but at least a 1.5 variant of the game adding new obstacles like stage bosses. You can't really compare it and other than the current situation I write this review, that version should be separated into an individual backloggd entry.

Whilst you might prefer that enhanced home version thinking of the original arcade Gyruss as redundant or repetitive, to me the game is an epitomic space shooting challenge just as Space Invaders, Galaxian or Galaga, but with its own twist. It's possible you've got to be a specific type of player to adopt a single game with the task to analyze, understand and beat it to a personal level of satisfaction.

If you are, why not try Gyruss if you haven't? Chance is you get just as hooked as I am, so wheel out your trusty arcade stick, try having a circular or at least octagonal gate and a ball top on it and enjoy!

Yoshiki Okamoto's second arcade shooter at Konami after the fantastic Time Pilot is an early "tube shooter", reminding of Atari's Tempest. Despite its impressive looks for an early 80s game, Gyruss is actually pretty simple: it's basically Galaga in "3D". Enemies appear in formation behind you, following a specific pattern, until they settle at a distance in the center of the screen. Once they all appeared, they will come to attack by shooting or trying to ram into your spaceship. There's also other obstacles like force fields and very annoying asteroids you can't shoot down, and once per stage a trio of space stations will turn up. If you shoot down the one in the middle, you'll gain the only power-up in the game, a precious double-shot. It's basically a must-have since the basic weapon is terrible.
Every few stages, it's (once more) Galaga all over again since you're treated to a very inspired bonus stage where you need to shoot down enemies formations "dancing" around before they get away.

Controls can take some time to get used to since Gyruss uses a joystick and not a spinner like Tempest. But once you do, it's a great pick-up and play experience, like all good arcade games of that period. Stages are short and intense, and the 3D perspective give the genre a nice twist (even if it makes precise dodging more difficult than it should). After a dozen of stages the difficulty and speed will spike, so be ready to memorize enemy formations if you want to go far because pure reflexes won't be enough to cut it.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the game is its soundtrack, a blasting remix of Bach's Toccata and Fugue that perfectly fits the frantic gameplay.
While I wouldn't call Gyruss an absolute must-play (unlike Time Pilot) it's still a fine arcade game from the golden age era and definitely worth a look.


One of the surprisingly common occurrences of a Konami game being better on NES than in the arcades.

Found this out in the wild while on vacation, tried it out, and was sorely disappointed that it didn't have super shots. Or boss fights. What the hell? Like, half of the cool things the game had going for it were new to the NES version. Managing your super shots and knowing when to fire them to pierce through armors and melt whatever is in front of you felt so... natural to the game's essence that I honestly couldn't believe it wasn't there from the start.

I guess it's impressive that it's a 1983 entry though.
Oh well. Love this game, still haven't actually gotten around to finishing it.

This game goes hard. Holy shit.

Release this on Arcade Archives already, Konami. I would gladly shut the fuck up about you if you did.

“Gyruss” isn’t one of my favorite’s from the golden age of arcades. I always found the tube aspect and “Tempest” style of control with shimmying around the outer ring hard to control and confusing. I played the Xbox 360 version and it was pleasant unlocking achievements and hearing the little triumphant song that XBLA games of old would do. You already know if this game is for you. It’s not for me.

Sorry Gyruss, I just... couldn't get behind the tube view and movement controls. I only beat this with the Konami code, but I can't say I didn't try! Made it all the way to Venus without it.

Call it what it is, as anyone else has pointed out. Gyruss is what happens when Tempest has a baby with insert Space Invaders clone of the early 80s here


Does Gyruss do anything genuinely groundbreaking? No. But does it do its little thing incredibly well? Absolutely.

This NES/FDS version is more than a port, it's basically a different game.
The most obvious differences are the look and sounds. It really feels like a Konami/Ultra game of that period, with chunky yet detailed sprites and additional music tracks in classic Konami style. I wouldn't call it better (the original arcade game is 5 years older yet still feels punchier), but different, kinda like the Gradius port.
More substantially, this version has way more content. It's longer, with more enemies, actual bosses, and a new special weapon to take them on. That weapon, a big cannon shot, has limited uses, and you will need to keep those precious shots for the most important moments (bosses). The new enemies and the bosses are extremely vicious and you will need to learn how to fight properly to stand any chance (I'm especially thinking of the asteroid brain guy straight out of Salamander that will absolutely waste you if you don't know what you are doing). Honestly, the game is a bit long (since you're just turning in a circle in space) and you don't have any continues so it starts to feel like a chore near the end. Last stage really takes the words "flying too close to the Sun" literally. It's brutal, and even more so when you realize that you have to redo the whole thing when you die. To be fair, I did manage to clear it and I'm terrible at the genre, so I guess it's not that hard of a game for real shooting fans.

I wouldn't say that there's a definitive version of Gyruss between the original and this one. The original felt like a great pick up and play experience, the NES port feels less exhilarating but with more depth. They're both worth a try.

I love the fusion of this game between tempest and galaga. It's basically like the perfect combination. It's pretty fun to play and the premise is interesting. For a title back in 1983 this really stands out among other arcade titles at the time. The music it used also has such a fun twist to it. Konami at their best back then. But MAN it is quite hard

This game is very addictive at 1st, but it can start to get old after a while since you're doing the same thing over and over again with not much changes. Still, for what it is, it's very fun, and one of my go-to games to pick up and play if I don't have that much time before I gotta do something.

~ Juegos que Hay que Jugar Antes de Morir ~
Parte 2 — Los 80: Caída y Resurgir

Juego 53: Gyruss (1983)

Divertidísimo, pero estoy hasta las narices de los arcades estúpidamente difíciles. Quiero poder revivir metiendo monedas por favor...