At 02:00 AM 5/27/00 -0400, you wrote:
>
>This brings up a subject I've been meaning to ask for a while. It appears
>that
>at the time the PCE was making AWESOME shooters, Spriggan, GoT, etc. the
>SNES make very
>few shooters and the ones I have seen have been very arcahiac. One I have
>in mind is
>Phalanx. While I kinda like this game, it reminds me of a game a step up
>from
>psychosis. In fact, while I think about it, is there ANY decent shooter on
>the SNES
>that compares to SSS, Final Soldier, LoT, Got, Spriggan, Download 2, etc?
>Anyone have
>an explanation why shooters were ignored on this platform?
>
Ah, Phalanx. This is the only game in my life that I've bought just
for the cover alone! The best part of my purchase was that it also came
with a nice poster of the cover art :)
If you look closely, you can see that the spaceship in the background
is really a Star Wars X-Wing model with the lasers removed.
The SNES does have a small selection of nice shooters, and the ones
it does well can be very good. However, due to the nature of the machine,
they're generally of the slow-paced side-scrolling variety. You won't
find any LOT-style craziness here.
Some of my favourites would be R-Type 3, Cotton 100%, Space Megaforce,
and UN Squadron. Gradius 3 is fun, but the slow-down is so awful that
playing it becomes a huge chore after a few levels - something a shooter
should never be!
Ironically, these particular shooters are mostly derived from series
which were quite successful on the PCE. If anything, do play Space
Megaforce. This game feels exactly like Blazing Lazers, right down to the
background music and the weapon system. Cotton is great, as well, and
plays very similar to the PCE one. The colourful nature of the game makes
it well-suited to the SFC.
Apparently there is a SFC Spriggan game, but I've never played it.
The big reason the SNES got very few shooters is it's terribly slow
processor speed. It's just not fast enough to keep track of enough sprites
required by the average shooter, and it really shows. The SNES took a lot
of flack in the beginning, since Gradius 3 and R-Type - two main launch
titles - featured some of the worst slow-down in history. After that,
developers quickly learned that shooters were the wrong type of game for
the system...
Matthew