Jamestown: The Game that Pretends to be a Port
A tribute to awkward home versions?
This is an adaptation of a comment left for the Cane and Rinse podcast.
Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony (2011) is caught between new and old ways of thinking about shmups. The game is obviously heavily influenced by arcade shmups dating back to the turn of the millennium. Cave’s Progear (2001) has been cited by the dev team as a particularly strong influence, but larger elements of Cave and Treasure’s house styles have also been found. But Jamestown tries to go in creative directions most arcade shmups don’t, with mixed results.
The shooting in Jamestown works, although it’s more mechanically simple than a lot of shmups. The player can choose a ship before starting a level from four different options, this choice is then locked for the duration of a level. This means a commitment is made by the player to execute an entire level in one particular style for its duration. This makes Jamestown a less dynamic shmup than other franchises like Raiden (1990) with its scaling/switching weapons or an Ikargua (2001) with its phase switching. In its place Jamestown has a bullet absorption mechanic in Vault that rewards players with points. It’s less exciting to play, but timing of Vault brings a tactical level of score building to Jamestown that other shmups lack. Jamestown’s mechanical design encourages the player to replay levels in order to determine when/where is best to use Vault. Success on the leaderboard isn’t tied to level clearing so much as clearing levels efficiently. Jamestown’s mechanical simplicity encourages the player to master level planning, not reflexive skill to get good. Ikaruga has some of this with its combo mechanic, but that game’s difficulty keeps the player more focused on the actual “playing” than Jamestown’s memorization focus.
Jamestown gets away with a tactical approach because it’s positioned differently from the classic arcade games that inspired it. Unlike most shmups, Jamestown was designed from the ground up as a home release. As you can replay levels instantly without paying new quarters each time the player can change, and improve their strategy gradually with practice. In an arcade game this would feel like a cheap grab for more coins.
Jamestown doesn’t go far enough though in benefiting from its home platform. If you play the story on either the “normal” or “difficult” difficulty setting you’ll learn the end of the game is only present on the higher difficulty settings, without any warning before hand. And this isn’t just a secret ending, start on “normal” and you’ll find 60% through the game that you have to start all over at the beginning on “difficult” is you want to continue. Same with that difficulty level 80% through the game. Having started on the first difficulty level, I was force to play through the front half three entire times to get to the final level, it’s a cheap way to artificially pad out a shorter game. This means the player will spend more time re-playing the easy, less interesting levels over and over. The game is structured to show the player its duller side more often than its more exciting content, a baffling decision that can make this game awful dull to slog through.
This also totally breaks the difficulty curve. Playing through the game the third time on “legendary” is still quite easy as so much of the difficulty in Jamestown is based on memorizing enemy placement and attack patterns. The player learns these things the first two times through the game, making the third pass very easy until they arrive at the final level. Playing an unseen level on “legendary” is much harder than doing it with practice, creating a massive difficulty spike right at the end of the game that ruins the established flow. The problem isn’t that the game gets hard, it’s that the game’s structure masks the difficulty before turning it on all at once.
As is Jamestown’s multiple modes don’t contribute to each other at all. It feels as if the game’s tried to include all the variations you would find in home releases of arcade games. While I always appreciate more modes, the game refuses to let them interact in any way. This makes sense for a home port, where they are fluffing up a short experience. But Jamestown is a home release and these modes could very easily be integrated into a more cohesive whole. The challenge mode or gauntlet mode should be incorporated right into the campaign as a means to unlock the later levels. Replaying so much of this game over and over is a weird decision. Jamestown ends up feeling like less of a love letter to classic shmups, but more of a tribute to their awkward home ports. Ports that much like Jamestown, show off the worst parts of the games proudly.
