Thursday 16 August 2018

Shadow Blasters (Mega Drive)

Shadow Blasters, also known as Shiten Myooh, is an interesting case. When I first played it, I wrote it off as an unfair, too-hard kusoge. For some resaon, though, I kept being drawn back to it, and the more I played it, the more I saw the good in it. For a start, it's not unfair, or too hard, it's just a very old fashioned (even for 1990) game that expects you to learn it, and offers little mercy or concession while you do so.

You get four characters (two ninja, a swordsman and a monk), who also act as your lives, and you can switch between them at any time from the pause menu. One concession the game does make is that it allows you to play the stages in whatever order you wish. The four characters each have their own very slightly different attacks, not in my opinion, they're not really different enough to warrant switching often. One thing that really feels missing from this game is the ability to heal characters while they're "tagged out", either automatically over time, or through power ups with that purpose. As it is though, you might as well play with one character until they die, then go onto the next, until you run out or finish the game. Maybe it would make the game too easy though?

On the other hand, something I did really find interesting about Shadow Blasters is the attack/power up system. Next to your health meter, there's a power meter, indicating how powerful your attacks are. You can charge it by holding the attack button for a more powerful attack. That's all fairly traditional, right? The twist that I really like, though, is that one of the power ups you collect makes it so a segment of your current character's power meter is always filled in, making charge shots take less time to power up, and gradually increasing the power of all your shots, until eventually, if you ever manage to collect nine of the items with one character, every one of your attacks is at full power. It's only something small, but I don't recall ever seeing it done in any other game, and I thought it was really cool.

Everything else about the game is fairly standard for an early Mega Drive action title: the stages are in forests, mountains, spaceships, and gritty inner cities, the enemies are a mix of humanoid troops who blindly march forward and weird small monsters that fly around, and the bosses are a decent enough array of big, weird monsters. It's not ground-breaking, but it is at least well executed. Shadow Blasters was apparently released in Japan and the US in the same week, but despite that, there's still some localisation silliness in there. In the JP version, the characters have the thematically appropriate names Kotarou, Ayame, Senshirou and Kidenbou, while the US version has the incredibly ill-fitting Horatio, Tiffany, Leo and Marco. That's more amusing than anything, tough the same can't be said for the disparity in quality between the two versions' boxarts: the Japanese copy has an incredible high quality painting, reminiscent of the best of the Heisei era Godzilla movie posters, while the US box has a laughable piece that looks like the cover of a self-published tabletop RPG supplement.

Whichever version you play, though, the game itself is surprisingly good if you have the patience to stick with it. You'll probably want to emulate, though, since it's apparently now rare and expensive. Though it was one of the built in ROMs on my chinese handheld Mega Drive clone, so that's also a nice way to get it!

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