Progear is something of an oddball amongst Cave games. Published in 2001, it was actually contracted and published by Capcom and developed on their CPS2 system, as opposed to Cave's own custom hardware. It was also their first side-scrolling shooter, and their only one, up until the arcade release of Deathsmiles in 2007. While Capcom had the fortitude to release a number of its shooters on the Dreamcast, like Mars Matrix and both Giga Wings, it neglected Progear, for whatever reason, and to this day remains unported.

The style is comparable to Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky, not only for its emphasis on elaborate flying contraptions, based on elements of steampunk, but also their anachronistic application to early-mid 20th century European backdrops. The general concept is also vaguely similar to, although not  inspired by, the anime Last Exile, which also had a group of young pilots taking to the skies. Its closest relative, stylistically, is probably the old Genesis/Gameboy Advance game Steel Empire, although Progear's pixel work is much more detailed and attractive.


Whenever any enemy explodes, it will cancel out any opposing bullets in the immediate vicinity. This is hard to judge with popcorn enemies, since the radius is pretty small, but it's much more feasiable with bigger bad guys, especially since they catch on fire right before they're about to die. Furthermore, against all laws of physics, the bullets of these larger enemies politely hover around them before they spread outward, allowing you to gauge the best moment to go in for the final strike and cancel out as many bullets as possible.

Bullet cancelling not only makes navigating through the curtain fire more feasiable - you can use waves of destroyed enemies to act as a shield of sorts - but it's also the crux of the scoring system. Any bullets cancelled will be transformed into jewelry. The kind of jewelry depends on the firing type - the RAPIDSHOT will yield rings while the LASER?? will yield gems. Continously grabbing rings will improve the jewelry rank, indicated by the icon at the bottom of the screen. This rank will also determine the value of the gems, whenever you use the laser. This is important because gems will give way, way more points then rings, but activating the laser to obtain them also resets the ring counter after a short period of time. And so, the idea is to build up the ring counter as high as possible and then identifying the best spots to cash them in, getting tons of high value gems in the process, before repeating again.

BOMBS

Each boss is prefaced by a small portrait of its enemy pilot, usually stuffy noblemen, rendered in the classy style of the time. Upon their defeat, they'll curse your pilots from behind the flames before going down with their ship. They're an odd bunch, seeing as one of them is named "Jimchuck Spanner" and seems to have some kind of puppet. Their appearances are brief and fleeting, but along with the portrait of your gunner during the end-of-stage tally - exaspaerated if you did badly, ecstatic if you've raked in the points - bestow a bit of extra personality to a game that already looks pretty gorgeous.

It just also might have the best takeoff sequence of any shooter yet made. In a zoomed up cinematic, your aircraft shakily flies from its burning hangar as your fellow children run up along side, cheering you on and waving flags, before you take off amidst a gigantic explosion. This is, of course, perfectly timed with the music. It sets the mood, it does.

The rest of the soundtrack is sadly rather middling. Compositionally, there's some good stuff, but the scratchy synth of the CPS2 board just can't pull of the orchestrations the composer GET NAME attempts, leaving it all sound somewhat unpleasant.

HOW DOES CO-PILOT ACT