Retro Game of the Day! Legendary Wings

Retro Game of the Day! Legendary Wings

Legendary Wings by Capcom, released for NES in 1988 (a more advanced arcade unit showed up a couple of years prior to that).


Yep, at the height of the early Capcom days on the NES. we got a fair amount of stuff like this - really colorful, quite simple gameplay, lots of action and shooting. They had the idea to deviate from the normal theme for these types of games (straight-up hi-tech) and put it into theis weird Greek/Egyptian themed setting instead. Well, it still had it's fair share of tech.

A bit of an odd duck when it hit the scene, the usual audience ate it up anyway. Capcom was no stranger to this style of gameplay (Section Z, and then later with the very popular Sidearms) so you can see why they wanted to shake up the setting a bit. Also unlike those other mentioned titles, this game featured it's fair share of gameplay in a top-view "overworld," periodically your character would be sucked into huge caverns and battle in horizontal mode.

All in all, this felt like a somewhat odd mixture of Xevious, Section Z, and maybe Gradius or R-Type or something (a little!) The winged flying characters were a little funny looking, but that was passable enough back in the day (the slick graphics, big bosses, and trademark funky badass "vintage Capcom" soundtrack made up for any otherwise-goofy awkwardness)


Overall, a nice and solid shooter for the NES, one which was probably a little outstanding in it's field to a degree (I think Capcom's final published shmup for the system, if memory serves). The two-player mode was a nice touch and the Egyptian touches looked nice.