Disc Station MSX #08

This volume of Disc Station is very shooting-heavy. Or at least, the parts that were useful to me were.
Disc one features a few playable demos, though most of them are for RPGs, so I didn't bother with them. One of them was for Aleste 2, though! Obviously, it's excellent, has some of the best graphics I've seen on the MSX and also is very very hard. So hard infact, that every time I tried to take a screenshot, I died. Oh no!
There's also a full game on disc one, being a very old shooter named Final Justice. Unfortunately, it really shows its age, being boring to look at and boring to play. And that's all for the first disc!
Disc two is more promising, though. It has episode one of the episodic shooting game Blaster Burn! (Episode one is actually the second installment, episode zero being the sole highlight of DSMSX#07).
Blaster Burn is pretty fun, it's a shooting game, but every time you play, the amount of enemies you shoot and the amount of power-ups you pick up each get added to two respective totals. As these totals build up, you can use the amassed points to upgrade your ship, with more lives, better weapons, faster movement, etc. So it's a shooter with RPG-style grinding, I guess. It's better than it sounds, really! There's apparently a way of carrying stats over between episodes, though I haven't yet worked that out. Does anyone reading this know how it's done, if it can be done at all?
There's also yet another shooting game entitled Sum The Forever, which is by Gamearts. This is a really strange game, featuring a crudely drawn fat guy who wears a different costume each stage shooting stuff. And that's it, really. It's not very interesting, but it is pretty strange. Plus, one of the stages has him dressed as Kamen Rider.
The last item of interest for this volume of Disc Station MSX is a christmas-themed animation, starring Santa and a whole bunch of Compile characters. It's short, but fairly cool.