SolarStriker

Players: 1 About: Simple shooting Courtesy of: Nintendo Back in: 1989 Originally on: GameBoy Also on: N/A

Widely available 8 months after the Japanese and North American GameBoy launch, SolarStriker reeks of Nintendo's efforts to quickly patch up the lack of traditional shoot'em-ups the console suffered from for almost a full year after its release. All other bases were covered: Super Mario Land was the lead platformer, Alleyway and Bulletproof's Tetris the first puzzle-like titles, and Golf, Tennis, Baseball, and F-1 Race taking care of sports and racing fans in a simplistic (yet decent) manner. Towards the end of 1989, Squaresoft spearheaded monochrome RPGs with Final Fantasy Legend in Japan, and yet shooter fans would have to wait another couple of months until Gunpei Yokoi himself would deliver the oddly simplistic and uninspired SolarStriker.

No brief description of Nintendo's only shooter will ever be more appropriate, accurate, and even amusing than the three sentences (well, two sentences and a noun) found in the back of its box: "Protect the galaxy. Defend the universe. SolarStriker." This kind of indifference seems to reign every aspect of the game, from the generic box art to the silly soundtrack, and can lead anyone to believe this shooter was but an afterthought designed only to fill a temporary void until more advanced titles showed up. Still, a quick look at the rest of R&D 1's first GameBoy games reveals the same lack of technical experience, visual style, and presentation; indicating SolarStriker's lack of soul is also a byproduct of its development team's limited knowledge of the hardware.

American cover

Token invading aliens, the Reticulon from the Turin system, confront the "Earth Federal Army's" state-of-the-art fighter SolarStriker throughout six very pedestrian stages also inhabited by their corresponding bosses (and some mini-bosses too). Each enemy type happens to enter the screen and attack always in the same predetermined pattern and formation. Nothing new to the genre (one of the earliest titles I can think of, Tecmo's arcade Star Force, uses this same mechanic), but it's this characteristic that helps keep the game interesting despite its simple nature by delivering a sense of power and control through their memorization.

Nintendo's legendary mastery of game controls and balanced difficulty are very present here too. Dodging bullets is never a problem thanks to the quick and responsive ship, cheap deaths are non-existent, and bosses are never too hard (there are specific "hiding spots" when facing them where the SolarStriker can't be harmed, if fighting them seems to hard for you). Just don't expect different weapons, screen-clearing bombs, shield pods, energy orbs, or any other classic shoot'em-up paraphernalia. The SolarStriker can upgrade its only gun from single to double, triple, and finally "missile" shot; while losing a life only downgrades it to the previous one. There are, however, no continue options of any kind, yet the game's perfectly balanced difficulty allows players to make progress over repeated playthroughs without a real need for them.

Japanese cover

Perhaps the most curious detail I noticed is that only one sprite in the entire game is animated. No, it isn't the SolarStriker itself. It's the first type of enemy one encounters in the beginning of the game, that rotating "8" shape. Every other sprite (including bosses) is completely stiff, yet their design is fairly varied considering how limited everything else is. Stage design and presentation (background graphics, to be specific), on the other hand, are embarrassingly lacking. If you thought Super Mario Land's backgrounds looked barebones and empty, think again. SolarStriker's endlessly repeating designs are as detailed and generic as those of a Game & Watch's pre-printed overlays, overly simplistic perhaps due to fear of onscreen clutter on the primitive LCD.

Nowadays much more a "fun fact" than a revered Nintendo classic, the company's only foray into the genre was never an obscure gem, let alone a rare cartridge. Used copies litter the internet just as they once filled store shelves around the world when brand new, and nowadays few are interested in owning a placeholder shooter whose purpose was completed the minute more inspired and technically advanced shoot'em-ups hit the market.

StarHawk

Players: 1 About: Troubled shooter Courtesy of: NMS Back in: 1992 Originally on: GameBoy Also on: N/A

Completely unrelated to Cinematronics' 1977 vector arcade game by the same name, StarHawk is, even to this day, a very rare find. It was published only in the U.S. by now defunct Accolade, and developed by NMS Software Ltd. (also in charge of GameBoy versions of Star Wars, Aladdin, and Super Off Road among others) exclusively for the GameBoy.

The scout ship StarHawk is on a mission to explore the "Evil Empire of Ax Tar", home to half organic, half machine mutant life forms with only one thing in mind: attacking anything in sight. Five very different stages and their corresponding bosses must be overcome by collecting lettered power-ups that grant a small variety of more powerful shots, sometimes transforming the StarHawk into different fighter ships in the process. This odd shape-shifting is only cosmetic and has no effect on the player's fighter other than to differentiate weapon types, but the whole system becomes silly once you realize most of the armament consists only of barely more powerful versions of the same straight shot.

Yet the game's main issues seem to have more to do with ignoring some of the most basic shoot'em-up conventions. Firstly, the ship's gun is located towards the sprite's bottom instead of properly centered. A seemingly innocuous detail that will cost you more than one life when the StarHawk's cockpit repeatedly smashes against cavern ceilings while trying to take down roof-hanging aliens.
The simple act of firing is also less than perfect. Somehow, manually tapping the fire button turns out to be faster and more effective than the auto-fire feature; yet this small illusive advantage is no match for how incredibly resilient most aliens are to the ship's armament, often forcing you to avoid every enemy wave in order to survive, in turn denying the upgrades they carry and trapping players in a vicious cycle that can be hard to get out of. Don't be surprised if you play through the entire game without seeing all available weapons.

American cover

NMS Software, possibly due to their lack of experience in the genre, seems to have completely overlooked all of these basic gameplay issues in favor of delivering one of the most visually impressive shoot'em-ups on the system. Background graphics are about as detailed as the hardware can display, often boasting fancy multi-layer backgrounds usually found in 16-bit games to simulate depth (the second stage's 7+ layers of parallax scrolling and beautiful distant mountains and cities are very impressive).
All sprites have a very distinct (and even refreshing) style that is closer to what European developers were designing in the days of the Commodore Amiga than anything that could have come out of Japan. Enemies are quite varied and most possess unusually fluid animation, yet StarHawk's huge but cookie-cutter collection of bosses sacrificed theirs in favor of size using the well-know trick of diplaying them as a moving background instead of a big sprite. This, of course, makes them virtually motionless.

StarHawk was clearly developed with an emphasis on eye candy but little experience in shoot'em-up mechanics. It borders the hardware's limits with lushly animated sprites and graphic details that ironically can only be appreciated in full on a screen that isn't the one it was developed for, yet the lack of a real soundtrack (all stages use the same track) and its many obvious yet overlooked balance issues render it a frustrating chore to play even when continue options, passwords, and even two difficulty settings are available.