One of my favorite games of all time, I highly anticipated playing a PC Engine version, particularly with its rarity and high price being what it is. But despite a Arcade Card release you would think that this game would show off the power of the Cd ROM , but unfortunally no, with great Capcom releases like Street Fighter 2 and Forgotten Worlds. It is hard to believe how bad they screwed this version up ,massive flickering on screen, lackluster graphics and slow load time do not make up for the 1 new stage or cinema displays. the Genesis version that was released years earlier is far superior, very disapointing indeed.
Unfortunately Capcom allowed NEC Avenue to bring Strider to the PC Engine. The end result is a very poor game with a totally incorrect color palette, a horrible frame rate and sub par gameplay. Only one stage through out the entire game has some parallaxing and the additional desert stage is really horrible. NEC Avenue also included some disgusting cinemas, talking bosses and a new Red Book audio sound track. The talking bosses really slow the gameplay down and the new sound track is horrible since it doesn\'t resemble the original. NEC Avenue also did the Forgotten Worlds conversion but they did not bring over Street Fighter II\'. Street Fighter II\' was done by NEC Home Electronics, a damn good developer. On the other hand NEC Avenue was always a horrible one. Overall, the gameplay does seem to be there to one degree or another but still this is total crap when compared to the Mega Drive or Arcade versions.
NEC Avenue HAS developed some high quality titles in the past; ie look at Super Darius 2 - the game is absolutely stunning with awesome graphics, audio and gameplay. If there were more than one group of developers in the company, with each one assigned a different project, then that might explain the difference in quality among their games.
Anyway, I agree that Strider could have been much better, but it is not as horrible as mentioned. Parallax scrolling is missing (except for one level as mentioned), and there\'s inexcusable flickering, plus the PCE color pallette is not fully utilized, but at least the sprites are large and the game does NOT have that dreaded SLOWDOWN that the arcade and Genesis (and even the Playstation) versions had. The 3D cinematics and the arranged soundtrack are done nicely, and they are the attractive points in the game. Playability is ok. Overall it lacks, but who knows, maybe it will be remade someday (or even its sequel) by homebrewers!
its ok and limited scrolling backgrounds. Just average!
I've read everywhere that the animation and graphics in this pale in comparison to the Genesis version- well- I've played both recently and it just isn't true. True- this version lacks parallex scrolling which the Genesis one has- but there's more animation frames- just look at the sword flash which has two frames in this version and one in the Genesis. Other things this version has that the Genesis lacks is a CD soundtrack and cutscenes and an extra bonus level (make sure you enable it)...
