Hishouzame

Hishouzame 飛翔鮫

Hishouzame (飛翔鮫, Flying Shark or Sky Shark in North America and Europe) is a vertically scrolling shoot-em up developed by Toaplan in 1987. It was published by Taito in Japan, Romstar in North America and Electocoin in Europe.

It was the third shoot 'em up developed by Toaplan but the first to use the new Motorola 68000 microprocessor. This new processor allowed for more onscreen sprites which allowed the designers at Toaplan to become more creative with enemy patterns and graphical touches. It was also the first Toaplan game to allow players to scroll the screen left or right.

Many ports of Hishouzame were released to many different consoles and often named Flying Shark or Sky Shark in North America and Europe. M2's ShotTriggers division announced in April 2020 that they were developing a new port of Hishouzame for modern consoles.

Gameplay Overview

Hishouzame is a prototypical Toaplan shoot 'em up with 8-way joystick movement, a shot button, and a bomb button.

Weapons

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• A (Press): Fires a shot. Tapping A fires many more shots than holding A.
• A (Hold): Auto fires but the shots do not repeat very fast.
• B: Launches a bomb. The bombs in this game generate circular fire that only affects that area of the screen. The bombs are not screen clearing and repeatedly damage enemy until the fire disappears. The bombed area also cancels all bullets that enter that area.

Items

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Item	Description	How to Get
Power Up	Increases the number of shots fired at a time by two, for a maximum of 5 upgrades	Spawns upon shooting down all 6 red planes in a pattern (red planes do not appear at maximum power)
Bomb	Adds a bomb to the player's total Bomb stock	Spawns upon shooting particular land targets like tanks or turrets on ships
1UP	Awards the player with an extend	Spawns upon shooting down 6 consecutive white planes, which randomly take the place of yellow planes

Power Item Locations

The red plane formations that drop a power item replace the yellow formations in specifically designated areas depending on the player's current power level:

Power	Areas
0	All
1	5,9,11,14,19,22,25,29,31,33,34,35,38+
2	10,13,19,23,28,30,33,35,38+
3	13,22,29,31,35,38+
4	12*,22,28,34,38+
5	None

*Although this area is designated eligible for power item drops at this power level, no such plane formations actually appear here.

Rank

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Hishouzame has a simple rank system with a maximum value of 15, and is determined by the formula area+loop*50/8 + difficulty
with area referring to the player's progress through the game. Rank primarily affects enemy bullet speed and the frequency of enemy attacks.
Enemy bullet speed has a maximum value of 21 and follows the formula 13 + rank/2 + loop + power

Loops

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Hishouzame loops indefinitely but from the second loop on, stage 1 is skipped as it was designed as an easy introductory stage for beginners. The enemy bullet speed increases by 1 each loop until the maximum value of 21 is reached. Eventually an overflow is reached at which point bullets will be given a calculated speed of 0 and become completely stationary. Using the formula above this can be calculated to occur at loop 65511 while at maximum power and rank.

Scoring

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Points are awarded by shooting down enemies and blowing up destructible environments like bunkers and mountains.

Power Ups and Bombs: Collecting power ups and bombs yields 150 pts each.

End Stage Bonus: 3000 points are awarded for each bomb left over at the end of the stage.

Yellow Planes: Shooting down all 6 yellow planes in a pattern yields 1000 pts. Once fully powered up, the red planes are replaced with yellow planes providing the player with the ability to increase their score even more.

Yellow Plane x6 1000 Points

Strategy

See (Template Page)/Strategy for stage maps, enemy and boss descriptions, walkthroughs, and advanced play strategies.

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This section details some particular strategic information about the game and its gameplay, such as hidden 1UPs and some basic scoring tricks. For anything particularly deep or highly complex, you can probably leave it in the Strategy page.

(Currently evaluating whether or not this specific section should even include information outside of the separated Strategy pages. Worth thinking about as a community.)

Creating a new page

There are two ways to create a new entry in the wiki:

1. Reference the new page that you would like to make on a page somewhere ( [[Your Page Name Here]] ), and then click the red link to be taken to the "missing page" screen. You can then click "create a new page" and start filling it out.
2. In the search box on the top right, type in the name of the page you would like to make, and then search. You will be taken to a similar page as above, prompting you to create the missing page.

Story and Setting

The arcade version of Hishouzame does not have any type of clear story. The UK version of the arcade game mentions a war that is being lost by "your" side and so they send in the "Flying Shark" to reclaim the lost bases.

The planes in the game are biplanes which would set the game in around World War I. However, the tanks and bomber plane would set the game closer to World War II.

In an interview, Masahiro Yuge states that the Vietnam war movie Apocalypse Now was the inspiration for the setting. A company trip to Thailand also helped form the scenery in the game.

The North American NES version instruction manual tells the story via a comic. It mentions World War II and how the Sky Shark is the last pilot in the battle. He must break through the enemy forces and save the American POW's.

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Development History

If available, you can include information here about the hardware, the development of the game, and its general reception. Try to have as much information in this section cited as possible.

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Version Differences

• Include information here about differences in a game between various versions. This includes regional differences, patch updates/bugfixes, and the like.

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Trivia

• Cool facts and random tidbits go here!

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Gallery

See (Template Page)/Gallery for our collection of images and scans for the game.

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References & Contributors

1. Primary info provided by Coreo