overdrive's Strike Gunner: S.T.G. review

Great review as usual Rob. I love reading about old shmups, and you're the man as far as those are concerned. I especially liked the paragraph dealing with the fifth boss, and the challenges it presented. I was a bit confused with the bit early on describing the seventh level boss as BRUTAL. That means brutally hard, right? (I'm easily confused, I realize this.) If so, that's particularly notable, given the fact that the rest of the game seems a snoozefest.

It was typed with the intent of being brutally difficult, but after reading your post, I could make a bit of a case for brutally tedious, as well. It's this huge ship that just goes crazy with flooding the screen with bullets and fireballs. You can knock a couple parts off (like the wings which are just spewing bullets all over the place) and eventually get left with the center part, which gives you a five-way spread of fireballs, occasional 3-way bullets and regularly drops big bullets which explode into a multi-directional (6 or 8-way) shot. The thing is, this center part takes FOREVER to kill. So you'll have 4-5-6 waves of it leaving the screen, coming back on, fighting you for awhile, leaving again and doing the same thing over and over.

Utterly insane fight that I would have loved, but it just dragged on and on.

That sounds particularly dumb when the actual levels are so vapid. It's so hard to get shooters right.

Ruder is gonna be mad at me for saying it, but even one of my all-time favs, Blazing Lazers, has some fairly weak bits in levels where nothing much is happening. Then, out of the blue, Level 5, 8, and especially 9 are tough by comparison.

Anyway, the point was, great review. ^_^

Masters, you should use this incriminating evidence against Ruder should he decide go against what you just said.

Edit: Nice review, OD!

Haha, good find Felix. I knew he felt that way too, but I'm surprised to find that it was down somewhere in black and white.

Six posts in, and nary a word of thanks from bitter OD.

Until this is fixed, I'm boycotting all his reviews.

HARSH! But appropriate punishment.

Uh.....thanks for the compliments, guys!....

There, I'm no longer bitter AND I wouldn't have been bitter nearly this long except I just woke up.

But I know what you mean, Masters. It's amazing how messed up mediocre shooters are. This game is slow-paced and repetitive, with levels that at least feel very long loaded with tons of predictable enemy waves. And then, you have a couple really intense boss fights and a high-speed tunnel run to end the game.

And it's funny you bring up Blazing Lazers. I've only played it briefly once, when I DLed a bunch of Turbo shooters and was testing them to make sure they worked on my emulator, but I think I know what you mean. I don't consider myself all that excellent with shooters, but I utterly breezed through the first level of that game....not dying once or even having any close calls. The only other game where that happened was some really horribly dull and slow side-scroller (began with a P, I think) that got dumped from my hard drive immediately afterward. All I was thinking was that the game seemed fun and had good mechanics, but that might have been the easiest level I'd ever played on a shooter.