is a 1990 vertically scrolling shooter arcade video game developed and originally published by Taito in Japan. Set on the fictional planet of Gloria in the 22nd century, where an alien race of space pirates known as the Wild Lizards have invaded the location and enslaved its inhabitants for gold extraction, players assume the role of settlers who were part of the planet's colonization team taking control of revolver-shaped fighter aircraft in an attempt to overthrow the invaders and free their surviving civilization from slavery.
Conceived by Takatsuna Senba during his time working at Taito, which served as his first original work under the role of both designer and producer, Gun Frontier became one of the several projects created to promote the then-newly released Taito F2 System hardware and had a turbulent development cycle, undergoing through various changes before its eventual launch to the market. Initially launched for the arcades, the game was later ported to the Sega Saturn by GOO! and published exclusively in Japan by Xing Entertainment on 25 September 1997 as part of their Arcade Gear series of releases for the console, and it has since been re-released through compilations such as Taito Legends 2 across various platforms in 2006, with each one featuring several changes compared to the original version. The title is dedicated to F2 System hardware engineer Katsujiro Fujimoto, who died during development in an accident.
Gun Frontier has been met with mixed critical reception from video game magazines and dedicated outlets since its initial launch in arcades and later on the Saturn. Despite garnering mixed response from the audience, Senba and some of the members in the development team would go on to create a horizontally scrolling shooter for Taito after its release; Metal Black, which was produced under the internal working title "Project Gun Frontier 2", although its actual connection to the original entry is very loose. Battle Garegga and Recca programmer Shinobu Yagawa has since referred it as one of his favorite titles.
Gameplay
Gun Frontier is a space Western-themed vertically scrolling shoot 'em up game. Players assume the role of planetary settlers who formed part in the colonization team of planet Gloria taking control of revolver-shaped fighter aircraft through six stages, in a last-ditch effort to defeat the Wild Lizards and free their surviving people from enslavement by the space pirates. Players start with dual machine guns which are strengthened and multiplied by upgrades that come in the form of US dimes taken from buffalo-shaped enemies and every five dimes empowers the aircraft's firepower. Players also start with a set number of bombs that can be upgraded to deal further destruction against enemies and scenery by collecting gold bars from destroyed ground forces and once a player accumulates 25 bombs, they are granted access to the Bomber Max, the strongest of the player's bombs.
The direction of the blast radius of the player's bombs correspond to their movement. If the player moves their plane to the lower right of the screen and launches their bombs, then the direction the bomb will travel in the opposite direction of the aircraft's movement. This feature can only be used however when a player has a large bomb count as only having one or two bombs will result in a small directionless explosion and like most bombs found in other shoot 'em ups released at the time, the bombs also work as a shield against incoming enemy fire. Bombing on determined locations is also crucial for reaching high-scores to obtain extra lives, as certain setpieces in some stages hosts a bonus secret within their scenery, as well as destroying enemies on certain spots.
A recovery system after using a credit during the continue screen is used, as players can pick up a spinning coin with two different sides: a silver side and a gold side. If the player collects the coin on its silver side, then the player merely gains another coin for their guns. However, if the player collects the coin on its gold side, then the player's firepower and bomb supply will be maximized to their full power. The game also uses a checkpoint system in which a downed single player will start off at the beginning of the checkpoint they managed to reach before dying. The title also employs an anti-autofire mechanism where the difficulty will max out by the second stage if the player is sustaining too fast of a fire rate. Getting hit by enemy fire will result in losing a live, as well as a penalty of decreasing the aircraft's weapon to one level and once all lives are lost, the game is over unless the player inserts more credits into the arcade machine to continue playing.