Whilst taking a breather from the arcade machines at last weekends Retro Revival event and sitting down to for a natter around the RCM area, I started looking through the selection of Sega Mega CD  boxes and stopped at this one purely based on it’s box art and the screenshots on the back.

 

It looks like fun I thought, so I fired it up on my mate Jim’s Sega Megadrive/32X/Mega CD stack.

 

Now, I’m not overly familiar with the majority of Sega Mega CD games, apart from some of the early PC CD-rom titles that were ported over and I’d always assumed that the rest were just cheesy FMV style games. It certainly bears more investigation on my part as man was I in for a treat with this game.
The in game visuals on the Mega CD versions are beyond anything I thought possible on the Megadrive and include silky smooth polygon ships, pre-rendered backdrops, plenty of cinematic speech and a cracking audio track . Playing this reminds me a little of Namco’s Starblade. although this is a full on vertical shmup as opposed to an on the rails shooter.

Part of the impressive intro animation. Static screenies are o.k but when this thing is animated it looks fantastic

 

 

I do recall playing something similar on PC once, albeit much basic in looks.  I’ve done a bit of research since playing this at the weekend and it appears that it may have been the 1988 conversion by Sierra Online based on the the NEC PC 8801 original. However, how this Mega-CD version slipped past my radar though I have no idea. Maybe it’s because at the time of it’s release, I was all immersed in a similar game at the time – Star Fox/Wing on the SNES.

Seconds ago a huge laser ripped through one of the large ships. Poor boggers!

The game itself is a bog standard shooter and includes the usual smatter of power ups and boss rushes. That’s not to say it’s a poor game of course, its actually one damn fine blaster and with the addition of those amazing prerendered backdrops, it really add to the drama going on around your ship.

 

The second level see you battle the enemy ships from deep within an asteroid belt. It looks superb in motion as they spin towards you or smash into one  another creating even more rocks to weave around.  You have limited shields which, when being depleted either by enemy fire or collision,  your firepower effectiveness is reduced too.

 

Like the opening scene from Revenge of the Sith….sorta.

 

Lock S-Foils into attack posi…..oh wait, I don’t have any of those.

 

 

After each stage, you can take a breather and decide which weapon upgrades you want fitting.  I’m sure there’s a right combination for each stage…just need to figure out which one!

and here’s a look at the intro and the first few levels.