Little Things: Whip Rush

What follows is my attempt to talk about Whip Rush and only Whip Rush. I will deliberately avoid mentioning its connections to Trouble Shooter. Instead I’ll just focus on Whip Rush, the 1990 Sega Genesis shooter developed by Vic Tokai. This isn’t an easy task. 

That’s because there isn’t much to say about Whip Rush. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s very much a middle-grade shooter from an age when its ilk swarmed the market. Notably reminiscent of Irem’s R-Type, this is a standard side-scrolling affair (with occasionally vertical interludes) where the player controls a cute little spaceship called Whip Rush and two accompanying weapon pods. There are lasers, missiles, fireballs, cityscapes, enemy bases, organically pulsating tunnels, and all the other expected sights of nearly every shooter from the early 1990s.

 

You’ll see glimmers of invention in a few boss battles, yet there is no elevating Whip Rush. It’s an unremarkable specimen of its day, harsh in the least compelling fashion. Surviving the levels depends entirely on powering up your weapons and keeping them: one hit demotes you to a pea-shooter and all but seals your fate. Perhaps an easier game would have gone down better, or perhaps that would have given it even less staying power. 

Is that all there is to Whip Rush? Hmm...well, there’s something I like about the opening.

One cliché that I always enjoy at least a little is the mysterious disappearance of some exploratory vessel, whether it’s a high-seas clipper or, as Whip Rush introduces, a trio of deep-space ships dispatched to discover new worlds. The mission is deemed “missing and presumed lost” five years into their journey, and their last transmission sees them approaching the planet Voltegus.

But hang on a second. The game then tells us that “less than a week after the incident” an ominous alien force arrives to attack Earth. So those three ships were listed as MIA within a week of losing contact? That seems a little hasty. What if their communications relays shorted out? What if their lone IT department wizard was on vacation? What if they just got lazy and didn’t feel like sending those control freaks back at Earth updates about every incremental piece of their voyage? 

Anyway, this is as much storyline as Whip Rush gets. It doesn’t even show an anime pilot at the controls of its ship. Even so, it's a shooter that's worth trying for a few minutes, I guess. Maybe you'll even stick with until the second stage, when you get to that underwater part where everything slows down. That's where it gets dull. 

Okay, fine. I’ll talk about Trouble Shooter. Whip Rush is notable for me only because of its connections to Vic Tokai’s next offering in the genre, known as Trouble Shooter in North America and Battle Mania in Japan. Whip Rush’s staff included Fujito Takada, a.k.a. Takayan the Barbarian, and in a Shmuplations-translated interview he mentions how he was the programmer for Whip Rush while the design was handled by someone else. 

It’s not hard to see Trouble Shooter growing out of Whip Rush. They’re similar in their approaches, mixing horizontal and vertical scrolling, and the available weapons and sound effects all seem from a similar source. 

Yet they’re exceedingly different where it counts. Whip Rush is unobtrusive and mediocre in appearances, while Trouble Shooter has personality at every turn, peppering widespread anime-heroine hyperdestruction with all sorts of tidbit references from whatever Takayan happened to like. It’s also a much easier game, more concerned with colorful details and large characters than it is with how long it might take the average player to finish everything. 

The Whip Rush ship appears in Trouble Shooter, toting power-ups for protagonists Madison and Crystal (or Mania and Maria) to collect. It’s entirely appropriate for a spacecraft that always looked a little too compact and cuddly for a blistering space shooter. I like to think that Madison and Crystal adopted it as a pet, much like Nanmo from Dirty Pair. I like to mention Dirty Pair at least once in my Trouble Shooter writeups, lest anime fans think me ignorant of the debt that just about everything with futuristic gun-slinging women and copious explosions owes to Kei and Yuri. 

Battle Mania Daiginjoh, sequel to Trouble Shooter, goes with a sleeker ship for its power-up deliveries. Is it a guest star from another Vic Tokai game, or perhaps a reference to another shooter from a rival company, like Technosoft’s Thunder Force? Or is it just a glimpse of how the Whip Rush ship might have been upgraded for a sequel that never was? 

Sequels are absent for every Vic Tokai game these days. While Tokai Communications still exists, they’ve long since left the game industry, and their catalog seems off-limits for reissues and new creations. If that ever changes, Whip Rush would not be my first choice for a follow-up, but perhaps its ship could sneak into a third Trouble Shooter game.