As such a large company Nintendo develops games across virtually every genre. The one that they’re not generally associated with is scrolling shooters, but looking back through their archive they did develop and publish one for the original Game Boy. This was SolarStriker, and it saw release very shortly after the system itself. This is yet another title that Gunpei Yokoi had his hand in, and because of this it has some historical relevance. Despite this SolarStriker has been largely forgotten by the gaming population. That’s the case with virtually every early Game Boy release that didn’t have ‘Mario’ or ‘Tetris’ in its name, but because I have such everlasting respect for Gunpei Yokoi I just had to check it out. In the past I’ve spoken about how Nintendo was desperate to fill out the Game Boy’s library early on, and unfortunately this is another case of them pushing software out as fast as possible without the polish their signature polish.
The story in SolarStriker takes place almost one hundred and fifty years in the future from present day. Space travel is now commonplace, and contact with aliens has been made. Fear of attack has led Earth to create a special force of ships for its defenses, and they soon strike out against a large army known as the Turin. Unfortunately the fleet was no match, and now their last hope lies on a single advanced craft known as the SolarStriker. You’re the pilot of this ship, and it’s your job to singularly defeat the entire Turin force. It’s pretty typical, and you actually have to read the instruction manual to find all this out because the game does little to explain its scenario. Either way, SolarStriker is a vertical scrolling shooter. You guide your ship in all directions from an overhead view, and the screen moves automatically to simulate the speed of flight. Enemies approach from the top of play field, and you can either avoid or destroy them. No matter which method you choose the gameplay continues on but defeating foes increases your score.
Power-ups are typically what makes or breaks an old-school shooter. Unfortunately this area is SolarStriker’s biggest weakness. First of all there’s no screen clearing bombs here. This was the norm for the genre back in this time, and it’s weird that the developers decided to totally omit the feature. You begin gameplay with a single shot that can fire in bursts of three. This is probably because of hardware limitations, but it’s adequate and I have no problems with that. Occasionally in each stage a power crate will drop down, and when destroyed it leaves behind an upgrade. The first gives you a twin shot. The second one you collect does absolutely nothing. Wait, what? It’s true, at first I was under the impression that you can only upgrade your primary weapon a single time but that’s not actually the case. Collecting a third one gives you a triple shot. The fourth pick-up once again does nothing, but a fifth gives you five lasers beams per shot. I mean, it’s kind of an original idea, but not one that I’m particularly fond of. You lose one level of power-up when you lose a life, but you do get to continue right from where you left off. Additional types of weapons would have gone a long way toward making this release more interesting.
That’s not the only area in which SolarStriker is overly simplistic. The stage layouts are extremely boring as well. Enemies always approach from above the screen with absolutely zero curveballs. In addition they all move slow as molasses. They don’t even begin firing projectiles at you until the later stages, and by then you’re already used to their plain jane movement patterns. The boss encounters serve to mix things up a little bit, but even these are by the books and fail to offer anything outside of the norm. You must target their weak points which are easily determined by the fact that they always fire a projectile straight down from them. It’s pretty weak, and in very few instances do they even having moving parts. The worst offense of this game is the fact that the action moves so slowly. The backgrounds scroll at a snail’s pace, and you feel more like your ship is walking rather than blasting through space. To make matters worse there are only a handful of different enemy types, and in just the first three levels (there are a total of six) you’ve already seen all of them. There’s a boss gauntlet at the end of the game, but this is highly typical and power-ups constantly scroll down making this obstacle surprisingly easy. This is not a particularly challenging release.
The gameplay is extremely simplistic, and the graphics match this very well. The enemies are extremely simple with a limited number of sprites, and they all look highly generic. Even your ship, the SolarStriker, looks painfully ordinary despite its’ cool name. The two biggest offenses in this category however are the backgrounds and the scrolling. The scenery is incredibly plain in this title. The first stage for example is a white background with random stars and planets. I understand why they went with the lighter color scheme, but the whole thing just looks lazy if you ask me. The second level features a planet’s surface with roads and varying terrain, but this is all represented with the most simple and basic outlines you can imagine. These backgrounds are pathetic even by Game Boy standards, and it’s shocking that Nintendo didn’t put more effort into this aspect of the game. The soundtrack is even pretty weak. The title theme is annoying, and the music for the first stage is good but repeats itself far too often. You’ll be tired of it very quickly.
