You can't run into walls
The Firelord's stage (in which you can die in two seconds by running into a wall) and others would beg to differ.
And walls in vertically-scrolling shmup stages are something that are just better off not done (look at other vert shmups that have them, and then look at how few of those actually have them implemented well), and are just one example of poor design present in this game. Others are the normal enemies that take multiple hits to kill without you being able to fire quickly enough to actually kill them, the overly-unforgiving power-up and checkpoint system (which would almost be fine if it was just in the horizontal levels, since that's a staple of level design there, but it's just inexcusable in the vertical levels, particularly since Toaplan shmups had checkpoints with recovery patterns years before this game was made), hitboxes larger than the player (retroactive tip for game designers, and this goes for all games: don't make the hitbox encompass the whole rectangle of a sprite just to make it encompass the whole character or ship), and the player ship being
five times as long as it is wide in the vertical levels (which, along with a lot of this other stuff, shows that the Silver Surfer doesn't work in a vert shmup).
And the music may be good, but I can go play something like
Shikigami no Shiro II (which coincidentally is one of the few vert shmups with well-implemented walls) or
Darius Gaiden and have fun to go along with my great soundtrack. (I'd use
Space Invaders Extreme 2 and
Battle Garegga as examples, but I talk about those all the time, and variety is the spice of life.)
And if I'm going to play a shmup that requires nothing but rote memorization of stage layouts, it's going to be
R-TYPE, not some poorly-designed licensed NES game.
