1943: The Battle of Midway
October 5th, 2023
Out of sheer boredom and a desire to spend every waking moment of my life talking about video games, I used this randomizer to pick a random retro game to write a blog post about. This is what happened next...
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I haven’t written any posts in a couple days because my attention has been occupied by another project of sorts, one which I think will benefit the blog in the future. But more on that in another post— this post is about 1943: The Battle of Midway
This game is named after the real life Battle of Midway, which happened in... 1942. good job capcom
1943: The Battle of Midway (which I will refer to as “1943” from now on because I do not feel like typing all those words over and over again) is a vertically scrolling shooter for the NES by our good ‘ol friends at Capcom. It’s actually a “port” of the arcade game of the same name, which (according to Wikipedia) was released one year prior to the NES release. I say “port” in quotation marks, because much like many other NES conversions of 80s arcade hits, the developers changed up the game design of the original by sprinkling in some light RPG elements into the mix
Capcom has a very spec'l way of spelling certain words
In 1943, you play as, strangely enough, an American fighter pilot taking on waves of Japanese aerial forces in WWII. The game opens with the power-up screen, where you are given 3 points to assign to any of your fighter plane’s 6 stats. Aside from the usual offense and defense stats, you’ve also got Energy Level, which increases your plane’s maximum Energy (more on that later), Special Weapon, which enables some of the more powerful weapons to drop as power-ups throughout the game, and Special Weapon Time Limit, which makes the special weapons you collect last for longer (they’re not permanent!)
In practice, how you assign your stat points makes a pretty significant difference in how you approach the game, which I like because it encourages you to experiment and try out different builds. I think you can get more stat points as the game goes on, but it only happened to me once the whole time I was playing, and it was because I happened to find a secret item hidden in one of the stages
From the moment your plane takes off, 1943 differentiates itself even more from other shooters by doing away with one hit kills. Your plane’s remaining Energy is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen, and ticks down slowly over time, as if it was a fuel meter. If you take a hit, a chunk of your Energy gets depleted— you can’t actually die unless you collide with another bullet (or enemy) when your Energy is already at 0. You only have 1 life, too, so you better be careful if you ever find yourself running low!
That isn’t all Energy is good for, though. With a press of the A button, you’ll unleash a barrage of lightning that destroys all small enemies onscreen and stuns the larger ones for a few seconds, which can really help out when you inevitably get overwhelmed by swarms of tiny planes and gunfire. The catch is using this special attack costs Energy, but you do gain Energy back after finishing a level, so there’s a bit of risk-reward involved with this attack— do I press the button now to clear the screen at the cost of my Energy, or do I try to brute force my way through with sheer dodging skill and conserve Energy, but risk getting hit?
If you ever want to play 1943, get ready to see this screen a lot
“NES jank” is a term I use sometimes to describe games from this era, as game design hadn’t really matured past the quarter munching tendencies of the arcades yet, and as a result a lot of the NES library has a reputation for being, to put it lightly, hard as balls. 1943 is no exception, as most of my playtime was spent trying (and failing) to beat the third level of a sixteen level game. But despite that, at no point did I feel discouraged from trying again. In a weirdly generous move for an NES port of an arcade shooter, 1943 offers infinite continues, so there’s nothing stopping you from trying your hand at a stage as many times as you want. The game also has a password system you can use to continue from wherever you left off. And most importantly, the game is just fun! It feels good to control, and single handedly blowing up entire battleships never gets old
These were my first impressions of 1943. It’s not the deepest game in the world, but it doesn’t need to be in order to be fun :)
