Speaking of retrogames: Star Soldier R

 Everybody's been doing a lot of buzzing about Megaman 9-- well-deserved, the game is brilliant-- but it got me thinking about an overlooked retro remake that I've given a lot of play: Star Soldier R. When you try to buy this game on the Wii Shop Channel, you're immediately offered a disclaimer which spells out for you the fact that you're about to buy a game whose total length is five minutes. If you don't measure the quality of a videogame by the length of playtime, you are rewarded by a damn fine videogame.

If you're at all familiar with the Star Soldier, you might already know why Star Soldier R is five minutes long. In addition to having a full-fledged and more traditional shooting game, the PC Engine Star Solder games always had a score attack mode, often called "Caravan stages" after the tournaments held on Hudson Japan's nationwide Caravan tours. This was big shit: check out all the kids who showed up! They were all there to score attack on these two and five-minute courses. The courses were really tightly-designed deals with a huge amount of content packed into them, waiting to be discovered. The length is perfect, because after just two minutes, you always want to play just two minutes more: note that Geometry Wars 2 picked up on this idea to great effect.

Anyway, there is no main game in Star Soldier R: it's just the two score attack levels. You take out everything you see, as fast as you can, including the scenery. The faster you blow stuff up, the more enemies the game throws back at you. You have infinite lives and it's not hard to finish the level on time, but those shooting for high scores will find that getting hit even once-- downgrading your weapons-- is completely disastrous to your run. I usually reset if I'm hit.

Because the game is so short, it's extremely tightly designed, and the player has to make the most of the restraints imposed. There are a lot of very subtle mechanics at work here, like the support units that can be used in offensive or defensive formations, but weaken if you simply leave them out in offensive, forcing you to time their use wisely. There's also an abundance of trick shot bonuses for doing things that may never actually occur to you to do while playing, but that you'll eventually do by accident.

Every time you play the game, something new pops out at you: you try something you hadn't thought of, or you see something that wasn't there, and your score goes up accordingly. These five minutes are truly packed: two-minute mode is, by itself, deep enough to practice for weeks. I should know: I did it and I just broke the local top 30 on the leaderboards, and the top 700 or so worldwide. To get started on your score attack, check out the official website for some helpful stuff from Master Higgins (Takahashi Meijin), the Adventure Island guy who doesn't so much play Star Soldier as forcefully demolish it.

Comments

[snes roms]

StarSoldier is awesome I got this for my Wii and find myself playing it often :)

Cool blog btw !