Just for this week, to make up for last week's mostly-awful games. And now, a request from The Chef...
SolarStrikerNintendo
Game Boy
One player only
SolarStriker is an incredibly basic yet very solid vertically-scrolling shooter. It's notable for being a Nintendo-developed shooter, since shmups aren't a genre they touched on often. It's a pretty easy game until you get to around the stage four boss, when the difficulty becomes closer to comparable shmups.
The game goes like this: shoot, shoot, don't die.
SolarStriker doesn't do anything special - sure, it's got decent graphics, and it sounds nice, but at its heart it is the vertically-scrolling shooter stripped to its core. The game is incredibly simple, but it's also plenty fun.
It's also cheap and pretty easy to find. It's not competing with
Tetris and
Qix for Game Boy Cartridge I See Most Often, but I've seen it enough times to call it "common," and I picked up my copy for three bucks back when GameStop still carried Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. If you come across a copy, go ahead and pick it up - there aren't enough shmups on Nintendo handhelds, and a Nintendo-developed shmup is a pretty rare thing.
Radar ScopeNintendo
Arcade (MAME-compatible)
One or two players alternating
Oh, here's another Nintendo-developed shooter.
Don't let that "grid" there fool you - this is a Galaxian
clone.Radar Scope was the first game Shigeru Miyamoto developed. It was somewhat popular in Japan for a time. It wasn't popular in the US at all, though, which is part of what led to the development of
Donkey Kong. But this is about
Radar Scope, not the game many of its units were converted to.
Doesn't the "grid" seem a bit dim here?Radar Scope is a
Galaxian clone. Enemies fly down from their neat little formation at the top of the screen to try to destroy the player ship. Aside from the odd angle, there are two things that set
Radar Scope apart from
Galaxian: the damage meter and the radar "grid." Enemies will drop decoys (with increasing frequency as the game progresses), and if the player doesn't destroy them before they hit the bottom of the screen, the damage meter goes down, causing the player to receive a lower end-of-level bonus and eventually weakening the blaster. With the "grid," if you shoot an enemy, the lower it is on the grid when it swoops down to attack, the more points the player receives for the kill. This risk-and-reward system is one of the few good things about
Radar Scope. But there are so many bad things...
Examine the above picture. Do you see that dot just above the radar "grid" there on the left side of the screen? That's a player bullet about to dissipate, fired from the ship at its position in that picture (as far left as it'll go). You'll notice there's an enemy to the left of that bullet and many above it. You can't hit those enemies until they fly down - and enemies that exist outside of the player's shot range are just one of
Radar Scope's many problems.
The game is full of poorly-translated text (which would remain a common feature of arcade games for some time), the sound effects aren't much of an improvement from
Space Invaders (which was two years earlier), and it looks far more outdated today than other games from the same year. Even
Radar Scope's Namco-developed predecessor seems to have aged better.
Go ahead and play
Radar Scope if you really want to try everything Shigeru Miyamoto is responsible for, but I can't recommend it to anyone wanting to play a good game.