Zanac A. I. - MSX - longplay
5The name “Zanac” is an anagram for “Nazca”. The mountains-and-plains setting is practically identical to Namco’s Xevious, released two years before, which featured the mystical Nazca Lines from southern Peru. Zanac doesn’t have these, but a similar setting is apparent. This connection only applies to the MSX release though, as the later versions substantially changed the game’s appearance.
Many many many thanks to @ReBITMAGAZINE for playing this game!
He's really a MSX expert (as well as many other home computer systems) so check his channel for some pure knowledge!
Now let's see what he wrote about this game:
ZANAC A.I. brought two innovations in the early years of shooter.
The first is an elaborate power up system: depending which color the power up is, it gives a different type of weapon, so the player can find what weapon is the best for him to use.
Power ups have a limited duration of 255 seconds, but if you get a white power up you can both increase power up time and main weapon fire.
If you want to play with the joystick, you absolutely must use a specific model due to the use of a second fire button, but if you prefer to use cursor keys, spacebar activates both weapons at the same time.
The second feature is linked to the game name itself, ZANAC A.I., where A.I. stands for "Artificial Intelligence".
ZANAC A.I. includes a system (you can see it at the top right corner of the screen) with those hexadecimal numbering called ALC (Automatic Level Control).
This system analyzes player's behavior, using some algorithms based on timing and killed enemies (which ones and how many of them are killed). The higher this rate is, the higher the difficulty level of the game becomes, so more and more hordes of enemies are sent to you.
ZANAC A.I. was the first game to use this difficulty system.
A Nes version was later released, but unfortunately, due to the limited CPU, ALC was not implemented.
From the ashes of ZANAC, Compile developed a sequel that would be the birth of another great saga: ALESTE! ZANAC is indeed considered the prologue of Aleste, which has the same type of poer ups, also bringing back some weapons from ZANAC.
But Aleste is another story....
ZANAC survived also with new generation systems. There are titles for PS1, PSP, Wii, PS3 and PS vita.
This video is part of the videogame endings database, whose goal is to catalogue and create the world's largest archive of videogame endings! (what an humble and not ambitious project :D)
If you want to contribute please let me know!