A lost 16-bit gem comes to an international audience for the first time.
In writing a review for this game I need to admit two things: firstly, even as a Cotton series fan, I had no idea this game existed. Secondly I absolutely hated it for the first 30 minutes.
A little history - Cotton is a highly regarded horizontal scrolling "cute'em up" shooter that first came to arcades in 1991 developed by Japanese company Success. This is the third game in the series and was released in 1994 in Japan only for the Mega Drive / Genesis 16-bit console. And this is where it starts to get weird... It isn't a horizontal shooter like every other Cotton game and is instead a head-on "rails shooter" leaning heavily on influence from the Sega classic Space Harrier.
Only 4,000 copies were produced - making it a collectors item today that fetches between $500-$1000. Finally, it is a psychedelic graphical masterpiece that technically goes beyond anything you've likely ever seen on the Mega Drive. No seriously, when I first saw screenshots of the game I thought "eh, kinda low-res for a Sega Saturn game, but that system was never really a 3D powerhouse." When I realized this was done on a 16-bit console: I could barely believe it. For fans of the MD/Genesis this rivals anything Sega themselves (or other technical masters like Treasure) ever developed. It employs a sprite scaling 3D effect a la Space Harrier to throw you into a fast paced world of psychedelic colors and effects pushing the Mega Drive to its technical limits.
The gameplay can be difficult - especially at first - orienting your brain to the sprite scaling 3D takes time. My first few playthroughs were a complete disaster, but then something clicked and once I was able to accurately discern the depth of enemies and obstacles: the fun began.
This package includes the original Mega Drive game, and a fair selection of Quality Of Life options to make it more playable today. A few common filters and display modes (highly advised to use "original size" to reduce sprite shimmering which can wreak havoc on 3D orientation), an auto-fire which removes the cooldown period found the original game, and most helpfully a rewind feature mapped to the shoulder buttons are included. Without the Rewind function I am not sure if I would have had the stomach to finish the game - but being able to rewind and quickly learn "what am I doing wrong here? When does that enemy reach the foreground? How can I safely dodge this?" combine to make the game Much more palatable to a modern audience.There is a reason why "sprite based 3D rail-shooters" were an evolutionary dead-end. Soon games like Star Fox would trade scaling sprites for polygons and truly open up new worlds of gameplay (and eventually games like Sin and Punishment, Panzer Dragoon, and Star Fox 64 took this genre to wonderful heights).
But tucked away in a historical closet is this oddity: Panorama Cotton. It is short (only 5 levels) but still has a great deal of variety, with many branching paths per level and imaginative bosses. Like the titular hero Cotton herself it can be described as "short and sweet" - a niche game in a niche genre - but still worth checking out if only to experience the prowess of the developers pushing a 16-bit machine right up to and past its theoretical limits. As a cute'em up and horizontal shooter fan ill be going back to the mainline Cotton series - but this one-off 3D adventure was an interesting look into the past.
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