When Side Arms: Hyper Dyne - the second title of the Jet Pack Hero trilogy - appeared on the sticky arcade floors in 1986, it was something of a surprise that the blonde haired Captain was nowhere to be seen. He was replaced by two fully armored, transforming mechs; and the gun-toting, thrill-a-minute, roller coaster ride of destruction such machines deliver was an immediate hit with increasingly hungry mid-'80s gamers.
Side Arms borrowed heavily from Japanese pop culture (the Mobile Suit Gundam anime and manga series in particular), while retaining the unusual, bi-directional shooting gameplay of its predecessor, Section-Z. Unfortunately, unlike Captain Commando or the Unnamed Warriors who would follow in the third and final part of the trilogy, the Hyper Dyne mechs were less suitable for revival in future starring roles.
Even so, the Hyper Dynes have made many cameo appearances in Capcom's impressive catalogue, sometimes as background color and other times as collectable bonus items. In much the same vein as Captain Commando was reinvented, Side Arms provided inspiration for another short series of mechanized fighting games, beginning in 1994 with Armored Warriors.
This scrolling beat-'em-up didn't take directly from its ancestor in terms of character revival, though the gameplay and designs were thoroughly saturated with Hyper Dyne chic. The broad range of mechs, on both sides, was a superb technical evolution of the Side Arms style, while the ability for players to briefly join their characters together into a "mega mech" was also retained to great effect.
Armored Warriors itself then spawned a sequel in 1995 in Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness; a one-on-one fighter that lifted characters directly from the first game to engage in tournament style battle. A spiritual successor to Cyberbots was then released in 1998, which brought the concept into glorious 3-D. Tech Romancer also took a step back from contemporary Japanese pop culture (increasingly complex, character-based mech) and went unexpectedly old school with its tank designs - far closer to its ancestor, Side Arms, than either Cyberbots or Armored Warriors had achieved. This organic development of the original side-scrolling shooter into a 3-D tournament fighter was a superb, and very well received, homage to what has become a classic arcade franchise in its own right, every bit as much as the rest of the Jet Pack Heroes.
Out of the trilogy, the third and final installment released in 1988, Forgotten Worlds, has had the most impact on Capcom as a game developer. While this title was the refined culmination of the more adventurous aspects from the previous Jet Pack Hero games, it was also an incubator for many experimental gaming systems and techniques attempted by Capcom down through the years.
The courageous cheeseball, Captain Commando, was once again absent (although Player 1's blonde-haired, blue-armored character strikes a remarkable resemblance), but the well-established "divergent shooter" gameplay was built upon once again, this time incorporating a hybrid paddle controller and fire button alongside the standard joystick. Rather than the bi-directional shooting capabilities seen in Section-Z and Side Arms, Forgotten Worlds allowed players to fully rotate their character to shoot in 16 different directions.
It worked quite nicely on an arcade cabinet, where dedicated hardware isn't really an issue, but the home systems struggled with conversions due to the lack of available controls to fully replicate Forgotten Worlds' unusual controller. This resonates rather profoundly with another famous attempt made by Capcom to add extra dimension to an otherwise ordinary game by way of unique hardware, in Steel Battalion. Many people will remember the enormous, complicated, dual joystick cockpit controller for the Xbox mech game
