Title: Strike Gunner S.T.G.
Release Date: March 27th 1992 (JP), June 1992 (NA)
Developer: Athena
Publisher: Athena (JP) NTVIC (NA
Now this is out of the order that was originally planned (I was actually planning on tackling Arcana next), but there were actually a bajillion games that came out on March 27th, and this seemed like a quick one I could knock out with some ease.
Background
Strike Gunner: S.T.G. is a vertical schmup developed originally for the arcades by Tecmo. This is one of those cases where the SNES port is actually a very faithful recreation of the arcade original. It is not quite a 1-to-1 port, but it is pretty darn close.
The story is pretty typical for a schmup on this blog: aliens have invaded Earth in the far off future of 2008 (har har), and the only people who can defend it are the "Strike Gunners:" two pilots in advanced jet fighters who lead the charge against the overwhelming alien force. The player can choose from the two pilots: Mark Mackenzie (red pilot) or Jane Sinclair (blue pilot). That really is it. The game takes the players over the most basic of locales from forests, to deserts, to the ocean, to the North Pole, and finally up into space to attack the alien mother ship. Bringing it to the consoles is a development company called Athena, a Japanese development team of little to no renown; their most interesting series is known as Dezaemon, which allowed players to create their own shoot-em-up levels/games. As far as I an tell, this company went under sometime in the early turn of the millennium. Gameplay
The game is a vertical schmup: players slowly scroll upwards while dealing with enemy crafts and threats as they invade the player's half of the screen. The player must gracefully dip and dodge enemy projectiles while destroying enemy crafts before the screen becomes too littered with bullets. The unique thing that Strike Gunner adds to this formula is that the player has a secondary fire or weapon that they can choose at the beginning of each stage. There are a total of fifteen choices, and each has a pretty different function: you could choose homing missiles, one giant screen clearing warhead, traditional Gradius style options, or even a shield that floats in front of you and blocks projectiles. This is all tied to a meter that can be exhausted with overuse. Once you use one of the sub-weapons on a stage, it cannot be chosen again for future stages. This is further impacted when you elect to play 2 player, as you both pick from the same pool of weapons.
Other than this innovation, the game is very stock standard. Long stages, looping music, and a boss at the end.
The game is a competent shooter. The game plays smoothly, can handle a lot of projectiles and enemies on screen with little to no slowdown (I only experienced it once on the second boss), and the animations are very nice. I also enjoyed the sub-weapon system as it gave the game that DonPachi feeling of just utterly out firing the enemy forces. The game is also not too difficult and ramps up its difficulty at an even pace.
There are a lot of different enemy crafts, and for a game with simple militaristic theming, this is pretty necessary to keep player attention throughout the entire game. They introduce new enemies and models consistsently, throw a good mix of them at you.
This is a game where competent design definitely does not mean good. This game is incredibly bland for a schmup. The enemy design, for being aliens, is weirdly human. You fight helicopters, jet planes, tanks, aircraft carriers, boats, and the like. You really don't fight alien craft until the last two levels, and even then they look more human in design than anything. The visual design of the levels, too, is very safe and samey. For example, the first level is a jungle, and the first half of the second level is also a jungle. It isn't even an interesting jungle, but clearly just a jungle texture copy and pasted across the entire screen. This is the same with the ocean level, the ice level, and the two desert levels.
This game moves very slowly, or at least the stages go on for way too long. This would have been a very nice 25 minute game, but instead they decide to pad it out to a 45 minute game by making the levels way too long. When you add the samey backgrounds, each level feels very boring.
Another issue is that you don't get power-ups by player skill, but instead at random. Other schmups will award you with a power-up when you clear a whole group of enemies, or survive for a period of time without taking a hit. This game, instead, randomly has a friendly stealth bomber drop off power-ups at regular intervals. What a weird choice.
Finally, the bosses can be really cheap. Usually, screen filling bosses stay at the top half of the screen, and if you have to travel through them, there is no hit penalty for moving over non-firing parts of the boss. Here, it is inconsistent, some bosses you can travel through, like the stage 3 tank, while other ones you can't touch at all. Worse, the huge mega-planes will start to travel to your part of the screen and are almost impossible to avoid. The second stage boss is a pain because it just lives in your half of the screen; it feels very unfair and imbalanced in difficulty.
'Music
Ads
Final Verdict
As far as a nice palette cleanser/quick blog post, this was an enjoyable game. Will I remember it after today? Probably not. Nothing about this game sticks out other than its competency. Isn't that a bitch? You make a bad game like D-Force and I will remember that for the next couple of years, but you make a competent one like Strike Gunner and I will probably only remember it as the game I played during my between restructuring slump. Whomp whomp. Collectors, though: this game is a bit of a rarity so it is a tad pricey. It currently goes for about $45 bucks for a loose cart. I think that is WAY too expensive for this, but I understand the collector's itch.
No comments:
Post a Comment