Zero Wing is another game made by Toaplan in 1989, the same year as Hellfire, Daisenpu, Same!x3 (and Demon's World but that's a run and gun). It's one of their two horizontal shooters, along with Hellfire. In this game, you take off every 'Zig' for great justice.
For some unknown reason they decided to include a very bright red flash whenever you kill an enemy. It is genuinely annoying, especially in areas with a lot of zakos where it keeps flashing. For another unknown reason, I don't get the red flashes on this version of MAME (this is ShmupMAME 4.2), which is good. I really recommend playing this game without the red flashes because it's purely annoying (at least for me), so I recommend to either get ShmupMAME (since apparently it removes them), find a "cheat" to remove them (here's one I found but never tested, in case you don't have it: pastebin.com/p... ) or play the Megadrive version (which is fine too).
You get three weapons: the red spread shot, the blue laser and the green homing missiles. Now that this is said, you can forget about the first two weapons because you won't need them. Blue laser is super weak, and the red shot is alright, but most of the time you're better off with the green one (not to mention that there are big vertical gaps between your red shots). The red one is useful to kill swarm of zakos, but there's never really a need to imperatively use it (at least for loop 1), and green does the job just fine for those.
The game offers some interesting ideas such as the tractor beam which would return in Dogyuun (but I find it less useful and too hard to use in Dogyuun). You can capture some enemies and use them as a shield or throw them, which is pretty fun. It's entirely optional and you can do the whole game without that, but it's nice to use it at least for a handy shield. There's also some sort of bomb, which you collect and will replace whatever you may have captured with the tractor beam, and will go off and protect you if a bullet hits it (you can still die if it comes from another angle and doesn't hit the bomb). You can also simply throw the bomb with the tractor button.
I use autofire for this run and really recommend it (30Hz), because it is extremely painful to play without that. The game doesn't even turn into a cakewalk with autofire because enemies still take a lot of time to die.
Most bosses, as well as many stage portions, are cheesable (or semi-cheesable) by staying in the top-left corner (bottom-left also works I guess), maybe occasionally making a dodge, and slowly depleting their HP with the homing shot, but I have to say that the final boss is pretty cool and fun to fight.
Even for a horizontal shooter, I feel like it has many fairly tough parts where you have to dodge the scenery, so that was a change for me. They also designed a lot of enemy spawns around that, especially in stage 6. These parts really have to be learned in order to clear the game.
For a clear, I really recommend learning stages 6 and 7 the most. The former isn't very hard but you need to remember where to go, when to go to the right for quick kills etc., and the latter is probably the hardest stage in the game, at least in the first loop.
Bullet visibility sometimes could have been better, it was common for me to die to things I simply couldn't see unless I knew they could happen and therefore focused on them. This can be an issue in stage 3 and the midboss in stage 6, but for the rest of the game it's more than alright. It's probably worse with the red flashes.
As I generally do, this is the 1P set, with checkpoints. When you die you lose everything. In the no-checkpoint version you respawn where you died with the weapon you were using + 1 power-up, so that's easier. Here you have to grind back to full power which can take a big amount of time because you need to collect the same power-up twice in a row, and they are quite scarce. I think it's the only actual difficulty difference, but it's a big one because one death might mean the end of your run unless you die at one of the few alright checkpoints. Power-up order seems different in 2P, but I don'tknow if it's a big deal.
The run went fine for the most part, except when I completely forgot to use my strategy against the 4th boss for some reason and died. Don't use this as a reference for this boss (the recovery was good though). What I generally do at full power is going down whenever it's firing stuff, especially the 5-way spreads and big balls (wait until the black thing at the bottom explodes before doing so). You know it's about to fire the annoying balls when the circle in the middle or the hatch open up. You can destroy the hatch and prevent it from firing some of the balls.
0:00 - Title Screen
0:08 - Stage 1
4:51 - Stage 2
9:32 - Stage 3
14:37 - Stage 4
18:27 - Stage 5
23:51 - Stage 6
28:53 - Stage 7
34:10 - Stage 8
39:18 - Stage 2-1
43:42 - Stage 2-2 and Game Over