Collection essentials #300: Detana TwinBee Yahho! Deluxe Pack (Saturn)

Here’s the first Japanese Saturn release I’m covering, and you’ll notice the packaging is very different. Japanese Saturn games came in a variation of the standard jewel cases from the era, such as those that music CDs came in. For American, like with Sega CD, they decided to make very large rectangular jewel cases instead, which in my opinion look pretty cool, but overall are worse because they take up much more space, can cause the instruction manuals to warp because of their size, and they are much harder to replace because they’re a unique size.

As for this game…yup, it’s more Konami. With new consoles like the Saturn that were much more powerful, companies like Konami were very happy that they could now make home versions of their arcade games that were much more accurate. Konami had several different series of arcade shoot ‘em ups at the time, and they took advantage of the new console generation’s power to make a few “deluxe packs” containing multiple games from each series. This TwinBee pack contains two games, “Detana TwinBee” from 1991 and “TwinBee Yahho!” from earlier in the same year as the pack came out, 1995. I previously covered a TwinBee game already, Pop’N TwinBee for SNES, which you can read about here.

TwinBee’s power-up system is not my favorite, as I described in that previous post, so these aren’t my favorite Konami shoot ‘em ups, but they’re still really fun regardless. Detana TwinBee is okay, but TwinBee Yahho! is really the highlight of this compilation. The game has cutscenes and a lot of voice work even during gameplay, which was not typical of the genre at the time. You obviously won’t be able to understand the dialogue if you don’t know Japanese, but it’s still pretty impressive. The game is full of charm and imaginative enemies, and a second player can join in for double the fun. Also, these home ports added an options menu which lets you tweak the difficulty among other things, which is very welcome.

Probably the biggest gripe is, despite having two games, there’s not a whole lot of content on here. Granted, shoot ‘em ups are games that you’re meant to play many times to try and master them and get a high score. This would have been a sweeter package had they included more games, as there were several other TwinBee games in existence at the time and I’m sure they could have all fit on the disc had Konami wanted to put them in there. But I suppose this disc was really supposed to feature TwinBee Yahho! and that Detana may have just been thrown in as a sort of bonus. While they may not be among my top favorite shmups, they still manage to stand out in a crowded genre and land a spot on my essentials list. And stay tuned, because there’s more Konami to come shortly!