Before SNK dedicated itself to make a LOT of fighting games (with a lot of classics, admittely), their output included also action platformers, and run n gun, even before hitting the jackpot with their beloved Metal Slug series, which i’m a really tempted to do a retrospective on… again, since clearly modern SNK it’s more interested in F2P titles that often reuse a lot of assets from the golden age of the series.
So to quench my thirst i searched my Arcade Archives library on the ol’ Switch for some similar Neo Geo run n gun goodness… and noticed i had but didn’t actually play Cyber Lip yet.
It’s referred to as a Metal Slug “clone”, which is incorrect but there’s some truth to it, since Metal Slug itself was fashioned after Contra, so it makes sense a SNK pre-Metal Slug game in that vein does play like Contra, down to the latching into poles on ceilings and stuff, with a boss being a shameless rip-off, but i guess its fine since Contra Shattered Soldier later had a “giant eyed boss” you fight by hanging on a pipe like the one you fight here.
Poetry, indeed.
The plot is SNK ripping off The Terminator (which WAS in style at the time, it actually was, though usually in videogames it was by Sunsoft), so its DA future (which we gotta SHAPE) and we have some super commandos – depending if you go solo or 2 players – being sent (by an unnamed Reagan-Carter gestalt looking US president) to deal with the giant supercomputer we built in order to protect our space colony from invaders, which is now malfunctioning and sending out an army of cyborgs n shit.
The supercomputer being named Cyber Lip, which sounds like the usual affair of Japanese people gluing together random English words depending on how they sounds and often ignoring what they actually mean… but the supercomputer really IS a cybernetic mouth with lasers, rockets, etc.
And it does possess the usual “Engrish” ability that was everywhere in SNK titles, though even the text (already in “english” even in original Japanese rom, like the speech bites) is surprisingly NOT that pronounced (the biggest, funniest typo being Cyber Lyp itself saying “insain”) here, as it the usual gaggle of random digitized English voiceovers that’s really there to flex on having so much space in the cart they can fit with the player character saying “I’m a goner” when it dies on its last life, or shit like that, maybe to hide the honestly very generic and kinda shit music tracks, not horrible but it’s Neo Geo, it’s actually resonable to expect better than this, even for an early release.
Same goes for the graphics, they’re fine, just kinda okay, underwhelming a bit, again, it’s Neo Geo, SNK wanted to know that their arcade games running on the new hardware were better looking than the stuff you could play at home… Cyber Lip instead does look like the kind of game that could have gotten a SNES port back in the day, or something, it’s not exactly “gaming eye candy”.
It’s decent in itself though it’s no Contra in terms of quality, the controls are ok but you can’t shoot at any angle, you can drop down from a plaform, with the most distinguish feature being that you carry over the weapons you have ammassed even after dying and continuing, with some Rolling Thunder-style rooms you can enter to reload all ammo.
Gameplay wise, in hindsight, feels like a proto-Metal Slug, what one could have imagined being the actual “pre-Metal Slug” when looking at Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy, more than In The Hunt was anyway (though Irem staff that made it would later form the team behind MS, Nazca).
There are also orb like support drones you can collect, but that’s about it in terms of gameplay, nothing you haven’t seen before (or later) for a run gun clearly basing itself on Konami classic series. Besides the ability to shoot diagonally, that would really make the game better.
It wouldn’t make the game Contra III: The Alien Wars better, but still…
To compensate you do have a super jump and a roll manouver, and to be quite frank it’s not even a particularly hard game, sure, arcade mentality and all, with some sections (like the boss gauntlet at the end) and some specific bosses being there to extort a good chunk of quarters from you, a mostly expected amount of cheapness, all things considered.
Even though there being a strict time limit BUT only for the first 2 stages, which is weird because the first two levels aren’t that hard to “filter out” players or be a difficulty spike made to guzzle more of your cents/quarters/allowance.
The bosses aren’t even that hard, to be honest (with some exceptions), a bit easy if you played a lot of run n gun games, so you might want to crank the difficulty level very high after a couple of runs.
Though the way the game incentivates those is a big ass lie, let’s be frank.
You see, after beating some bosses and hence finishing a level, you are put into an elevator and can choose if to go “up” or “down”.
Reasonably you would expect to be multiple routes, with at least one leading to the “true ending”, since after beating it you see what you’d assume it’s the “bad ending”…. that is also the ONLY ending, meaning that yes, that elevator select screen just lead to some variations of the bosses and some extra sewer sequences, if you look at the manual included in the ACA rerelease it will just tell you even choosing “up” or “down” is a facade, it’s random anyway.
This i feel in order to create the idea of a true ending and making gamers hope to find it by playing it over and over, but nope, you get a downer “ thanks for helping the bad guys that puppet mastered your ass in removing the only obstacle left in our way” ending.
Yep, you were played, you were a pawn and now the aliens (one masquerading as the President that gave you order during the whole game) have no more potential obstacles stopping their invasion, after setting up the supercomputer Cyber Lip to be “evil” so you would destroy it.
Honestly i kinda like it, and that’s also the best thing that Cyber Lip has going for it, it’s not completely forgettable or unbearably mediocre, it is a decent game but it blends in with so many better run n gun games of the era (especially so when SNK would debut the Metal Slug series that this feels like a prototype of sorts to), it doesn’t dazzle the eyes like many Neo Geo titles (even early ones like this) were doing at the time, so it just kinda fell in between the cracks, it was made available for the Neo Geo AES (aka the consolized home version of the arcade harware for Neo Geo titles) in 1991 and later released for the Neo Geo CD in 1995, but it never left the Neo Geo ecosystem until the Arcade Archives rerelease in 2018 for pretty much everything.
So i’d recommend getting this one on sale on your platform on choice if you like old school run n gun games, especially those that shamelessly “tribute” Contra.
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