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August 12th, 2015 
Carl Williams 
Scrolling shooters are a staple of videogames. Don’t believe me, just go look at the catalog of games from the first days of videogames. Asteroids was a shooter, so was Raid on Bungling Bay. Defender- yep. On the NES there were countless titles such as Gradius, Guardian Legend and more. Scrolling shooters in general are “retrogaming” and are going to be around in the future, that is for sure as indie and homebrew developers are picking up the slack left by the “professionals”. One console that was left in Japan and certainly not on the radar for most gamers in North America is the NEC PC-FX. Anyone remember this one? Anyone?
Choshin Heiki Zeroigar is an overhead scrolling shooter that has chosen a popular setting for shooters in the retro world. World War II. There is a lengthy opening sequence for fans to check out, now thanks to PCEngineFX forum member, “SamIAm”, this can be enjoyed in English. Since the PC-FX does not feature copy protection it is rather easy to patch your legally owned copy of Chojin Heiki Zeroigar.
Fans of overhead shooters will be right at home with this game, just it is on a weird console in the first place. The PC-FX was not shown off as a 2D powerhouse of a system, at least that is how it was featured in North American magazines such as Gamefan and Electronic Gaming Monthly. Hell, the console was built from the ground up to be a full motion video (FMV) console, though according to the members of PCEngineFX.com’s forums, there is the capability under the hood of the PC-FX to do 2D better than the original Playstation. NEC set it up like this on purpose, check out titles like Battle Heat or Team Innocent- the system’s focus was being moved around strategically to cater to a new generation of gamer, one that never really materialized to support this effort.
For more proof of this check out the gameplay video of Chojin Heiki Zeroigar in action. Definitely play at your own risk here. For those wanting something smoother may I suggest the 194X series?
Source: Retrocollect
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Yes, NEC did try to market the console on its FMV capabilities … but it was actually a 2D powerhouse with 6 layers of scrolling backgrounds, 128 sprites, and a fast processor that happily runs Zeroigar at 60fps. The jerkiness that you’re seeing in the video is a result of YouTube’s reprocessing, not the PC-FX itself.
Thanks for the info elmer! It’s a shame the PC-FX is still getting hate despite the unique library of titles it can claim as its own.
Thank you, Elmer, for that bit of info- I have removed the comment about “jerkiness” from the article as it is Youtube and not the hardware at fault.
I personally think the PC-FX was quite underrated,that is why I cover it as much as possible here on Retro Gaming Magazine. As you can see by our coverage across the site, we are not all that interested in being the 10,000th site to write up a review on Super Mario Bros 3 when there are a ton of games, like this one, that are going unnoticed by fans.
Thanks for removing the bit about the “jerkiness”, I appreciate that you were willing to edit the article.
If you ever want to have a discussion about the PC-FX, and maybe get a more accurate understanding of the machine’s capabilities in relation to the other 5th-generation consoles, then I’d be happy to chat, either here, or on some other forum like PCEngineFX (we don’t actually bite).
Thank you for bringing it up. We are all about being as upfront and honest with our readers. The last thing we want to do is give a game a bad rap for something that is not actually there (like bad Youtube encoding).
I have an account over on PCEngineFX’s forums but I don’t remember what my password is and apparently I don’t have the e-mail that is linked to it (I have been waiting over a day for the password recovery e-mail and still don’t have it).
I would love to talk with everyone there with the intent of doing a special on the PC-FX like I did for the Sharp X68000 in our second issue.
Haha … there are definitely some negative things to say about NEC’s positioning of the PC-FX, and the library of games that it got in its short lifetime.
But there are also some good things to say.
I, for one, believe that there’s an interesting tale to be told.
I’ve contacted the PCEngineFX moderators, and I hope that you’ll get some action on that password-recovery email soon.
Historically we can see the problems but back in the day, it is easily conceivable that NEC honestly believed they were going in the right direction. It was quite a crossroads to be at in gaming- just gaming didn’t go the same direction that NEC did.
With the lack of information on the PC-FX it is quite compelling to run wild with something, anything, but it is a story that needs to be told right the first time. That is all we may get with possible fans.
I just checked, I don’t have that e-mail address anymore. May start a new account but I like keeping the same screen name across forums (triverse). Just keeps things easy to remember. lol
Thanks for your help with the forum thing, by the way.
Just made a new account (RGMag) and now waiting for the admins to approve my account so I can join the conversations over there. See you soon!
It took a bit longer than hoped, but your old “triverse” account should be resurrected now, too.
The email address was changed to the one that I found here for you.
Thanks, Elmer. I made a couple of posts with the “RGMag” account already but if I can get the password for “triverse” I will use that one.