G Vector - Soft Office 1997 Sega Saturn
This is a storyless chase-plane rail shooter that unfortunately is entirely too difficult to enjoy. You fly a fighter ship through 6 stages that include asteroid belts, tunnels, over cities and above oceans and clouds. The terrain is 3D and while you can't actually run into it, enemies can and do use it for cover. There's a pretty good mix of enemy types that include air and ground vehicles, mecha and mechanical insects. You're equipped with slow and rapid-fire lasers as well as homing missiles. You also have two shields per stage and they aren't anywhere near enough as this game literally sweeps the front of the screen with blobs of incoming fire. It can be so intense at times that it actually causes the frame rate to stutter and slowdown. It probably doesn't help that they decided to show hits and model damaging on enemies as streams of colored chafe flying off.
A score attack mode option let's you play any of the stages you have already completed with unlimited shields. You'll probably wish you had the unlimited shield option in the regular game and there is an Action Replay code that will do just that.
The game graphics are colorful but pixilated. One nice feature of the game is a menu option that allows you to scroll through 62 enemies and manipulate and view them from any angle. It's not a game I would care to recommend to anyone.
Didn't run across any screenshots of the game, but you can see some gameplay footage here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2g5rGgvBKQ
GAMEPLAY: 4
GRAPHICS: 5
SOUND: 7
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 10
OVERALL: 4
Stellar Assault SS - Sega 1998 Sega Saturn
Engrish from the back of the manual...
The Furious COSMOS!
FINAL BATTLE Have Just Started Now!
WHY they come attack us biyearly?
WHERE are they from?
And WHO ARE THEY?
This is supposed to be a sequel/remake of the Sega 32X Stellar Assault (Shadow Squadron) game. It's a free flight space shooter that's displayed in a letter-box format, which is pretty unusual considering it's age and gives it something of an epic feeling. You can select from two types of ships with shields, radar and minor differences in speed and weapons. You're usually accompanied by multiple wingmen who I often wished would just shut up! Regrettably, they are impervious to ahh - weapons malfunctions. The missions are varied, lengthy and at times - rather fun to play. The game feels as immense as space itself and I seldom felt the playing field was constricted in any way. The graphics were so-so, but I never thought the Saturn was worth a damn for 3D games anyway. Somehow they managed to make the explosions appear like sparklers or small fireworks had gone off on the screen which looked good, but most of the big stuff breaks up into big flat polygonal shards and floats away. The Japanese voice acting (and there's plenty of it) sucks donkey balls. The sound effects were acceptably average except for the constant drone of your fighter's engines, which sounded like something that could have been done on an Atari 5200.
The numerous smaller enemy ships act as cannon fodder and sweeping the stars clear of them isn't really much of a challenge, but the large capital ships take some pounding and they do have formidable defensive laser cannons. The ground installations built on large floating asteroids were even more formidable still. Those built inside asteroids severely tested my flight skills and definitely make use of the ships otherwise useless roll capabilities.
The game provides for 2 players, but it's not the split-screen kind of play. Instead, one player flies the ship and the other player handles the weapons. It sounds dumb, but this game has missions that seemed designed to make that style of play very advantageous. The gunner has complete independent control of the target reticule and can aim and fire at anything on the screen. Instead of making kamikaze head-on charges into targets that the single player is forced to do, the pilot can take evasive action while the gunner is still able to hammer away at the target.
There's supposed to be 15 missions in the game, 2 of which are dependent on your actions while playing. All the game text is in English, but all the speech is in Japanese. It may not be worth the price of admission, but it is a reasonably challenging game to play.
Didn't find any screenshots of the game, but there is some gameplay footage here...
http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...&search=Search
GAMEPLAY: 8
GRAPHICS: 7
SOUND: 6
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 7
OVERALL: 7
EOS: Edge Of Skyhigh - Micronet 1997 PlayStation
This is a chase view flying mecha-suit shooter. You can transform yourself at anytime from flying Superman style to standing upright while in flight. You're a much bigger target upright, but you now have the ability to charge a weapon for a powershot. In either mode you can fire homing missiles or rapid fire plasma bolts. There are 6 stages in the game with the last devoted to "killing the core". The stages include flying over oceans and clouds, through forests and swamps, over cities, through twisting canyons, caverns and tunnels. In this game you can run into objects, so you need to avoid tree's, bridges, beams and other obstacles. The enemies included the expected assortment of fighter ships and aircraft, other mecha and some fixed point ground turrets. Where I thought it got to be pretty interesting was in the forest/swamp level. At first you're dodging through the trees blasting away at mechanical dragonfly's, then you get to the swamp and porpoise and other fishes are jumping out of the water shooting at you, get to the end of the swamp and gigantic metallic shrimp take flight and start to hassle you. Get past all that and you reach the stage boss - a towering praying mantis spewing flames with some sort of grabby three finger appendage coming out of it's groinal region. Some fairly original stuff!
The games features autosaves and unlimited continues that will restart you right about where you lost.
I will say this about the game, with all the stuff going on I never experienced a bit of slowdown. The game is colorful for the most part, the intro and ending FMV looked really nice, but the between stage stuff was just talking heads who's lips didn't even move in synch with their voices. The game is just mindless shooting fun that doesn't do anything new but also isn't overly difficult.
Here's some screenshots of the game, courtesy of C-Games...
http://www.c-games.info/games,002,3305.html
GAMEPLAY: 6
GRAPHICS: 7
SOUND: 7
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 7
OVERALL: 7
Cowby Bebop - Bandai 1998 PlaySation
Another 3rd person flight shooter based on the Cowboy Bepop anime. The crew of the Bebop finds itself lost in an unknown galaxy and comes under attack. You take the Swordfish II on 6 missions to defend the good ship and crew. This plays a little differently because you don't really feel like you're steering the ship but rather you're steering the target reticule and the Swordfish II merely follows as if being towed. You can however, send roll inputs to the Swordfish II and control how it's oriented while it's tagging along. You're pretty much forced to fly a specific flight path with a guiding arrow on your target reticule showing you the way, but there are branching paths in the game if you can find them. If you release the controls entirely, the game will automatically take over and navigate the route for you. If you attempt to leave the preset paths, the ship will lose control, force you back on path and probably crash several times in the process. You don't want to do that because even though the Sworfish II has shields, everything it makes contact with in the game damages it.
Most of the missions force you fly through skinny spots - a narrow twisting canyon, between skyscrapers in a city, over and under bridges or even chasing a train through a tunnel, hence your ability to roll the ship. The challenge of the game is moving the reticule around to attack enemies while keeping an eye on the position of the Swordfish II so that it isn't running into anything. It's fairly challenging and after some of my early frustrations with it wore off, I actually started to enjoy it.
The first three missions take place on a hostile planet. Once off the planet, you'll fly one mission in space dodging through asteroids and then the last two have you attacking a death star complete with trenches, tunnels and walking At-At's.
At the end of each mission stage, you face a boss and can fly freely around in a small death match arena. The areas are a little cramped for space, but the Swordfish II is perfectly capable of doing loop-de-loops and you can attack your enemy in vertical power dives instead of wide circular runs.
The Swordfish II is equipped with a 12.7 mm machinegun with unlimited ammunition and a Ruby laser gun that fires for a few seconds before overheating. Successfully completing a mission earns you points that can be used to purchase upgrades for the Ruby laser, buy armor piercing or explosive ammo for the machinegun, or add new weapons like missiles and energy bolts.
The machinegun was my favorite weapon of the game. Not that it was all powerful, but the bullets would kick up dirt and shred leaves from tree's and look - well, like what real bullets would do and I liked that. More so for the fact that the game offers plenty of opportunities for strafing runs on trains, ships, vehicles and buildings.
The game handles the anime license by having the Bebop crew pop up in small windows during play offering encouragement and words of advice. The cut scenes looked like they were done with the in-game engine and suffered jaggies, but at least the voices were done with the original Japanese cast and they took the time to synch the lips with the voices. For a flight shooter it's not a bad game at all. If you wanted a game to play the Bebop characters, you'd be very disappointed.
Here some screenshots of the game courtesy of C-Games...
http://www.c-games.info/games,002,1546.html
And here's some low resolution gameplay footage on YouTube...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...arch&plindex=0
GAMEPLAY: 7
GRAPHICS: 7
SOUND: 7
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 7
OVERALL: 7
Choro Q Jet: Rainbow Wings - Takara 1998 PlayStation
This is a 3D chase view shooter from Takara's Choro Q series. You start by selecting from eight different miniature aircraft, most of which are piloted by kids who are verbally enthusiastic for missions, while at the same time are apologetic for each enemy aircraft shot down. The aircraft are based on actual fighters and bombers that range from a WWII Dauntless dive bomber and P-38 Lightning to modern F-15 and F-117 jets. There's even an attack helicopter thrown in for good measure. Each is rated according to it's speed and armor and each has a unique special weapon that tries to look impressive in action but doesn't perform nearly as well as you would hope for. Your mainstay weapons are machineguns with unlimited ammunition and radar guided homing missiles. The missiles pack a good punch but are notorious for breaking off the intended target and chasing the nearest target of opportunity even though it doesn't have the range or maneuverability to have a chance in Hell of intercepting it.
The game tasks you with performing both offensive and defensive missions while the skies are filled with a never-ending supply of harassing enemy fighters trying to shoot you down. Your target area is always sprinkled with repairs, spare ammo and invisibility power-ups, but it's also defended with everything from missile batteries to monolithic structures firing super weapons. When you have successfully completed you're mission, you are immediately thrown into a one-on-one aerial boss battle with someone who seems none too pleased with your success.
All of the aircraft fly quite slowly, but you can use a never exhausting supply of boost for short bursts of speed. The tradeoff is that your weapons will be rendered useless for a few seconds after using it.
The game is done in a free flight form so you can perform your missions in whatever manner you choose, although some do have a time limit. There are only 4 missions to the game and the first three are easy enough to consider it a child's game. The fourth and final mission is a 3-stage marathon against an aerial armada and the end boss's "dirigible of doom". It's so well armed and armored that I think it was designed specifically to make children cry and has so far outlasted me despite every conceivable aircraft and tactic combination I could try.
I enjoyed the freedom that free flight gave the game, though it's very short and graphically designed for a younger audience. Sadly, I considered the games graphics to be below average. The difficulty is simply unconscionable!
The only pic I could find of the game is the case artwork....
http://noujoumonogatari.sakura.ne.jp...bouxingusu.jpg
GAMEPLAY: 4
GRAPHICS: 4
SOUND: 8
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 0
OVERALL: 4
Gamera 2000 - Surveyor Corporation 1997 PlayStation
This is a game I've wanted to own for a long time. I don't know that it will ever achieve the status of "all your bases belong to us" in gaming lore, but even Gamespot had an article discussing it's notorious FMV while reviewing the game. They even manage to put the game in the proper timeline to the Gamera films. HG101 classicgaming did a thorough review, so between the two there's really not much I could add. But for those who are particularly fussy about the completeness of their games, something that neither article mentioned is that the game did include a sheet of memory stickers. And by the way, I enjoyed Gamera 2000 much more than I did Zero Wing.
You can see some screenshots courtesy of c-games here...
http://www.c-games.info/games,002,1776.html
Classicgaming's review here...
http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.c...era/gamera.htm
Gamespot's review here...
http://www.gamespot.com/ps/action/ga...00/review.html
And you can see the games intro and all the cheesy FMV courtesy of YouTube here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0UQOCx7L1c
GAMEPLAY: 8
GRAPHICS: 8
SOUND: 8
ENGLISH FRIENDLY: 10
OVERALL: 9
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Originally Posted by Spartacus
cant wait to play it ........
