Arcade Archives: Final Star Force

[tepidsnake]

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This week's Arcade Archives release is... Final Star Force (Tecmo, 1992)

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Just a single ROM for this release. Preference Settings allow solo players to play as the player two side ship without swapping controls, alter whether rapid fire shot inputs are enabled or disabled when using a bomb, change the speed of enemies in order to prevent endless loops in boss fights, reduce (but not remove) the processing lag and improve responsiveness and alter in-game text from the original to correct typos.

We're once again outside of my wheelhouse, as shmups really aren't my area of expertise (if you can say I have one- general action, maybe? Multi-event sports games? Just The NewZealand Story and nothing else?) but I'll do my best with this one. After the arcade Star Force and the Famicom-exclusive Super Star Force, this is the third Star Force game and while it has a few things in common with the previous games, like an enemy that forms itself in the middle of the screen and some ground targets reminiscent of the original in later stages, you can probably treat this as its own thing. The weapon system is pretty interesting though- you power up by simple surviving, as a bar in the corner fills up as long as you don't die, powering up your main weapon when it fills up to a maximum of seven levels, but you change weapons by grabbing PULSATOR Capsules (which also changes the music!), with each having a distinct shot, missile and bomb. Dying usually reduces the power meter by just one, so don't worry, you can still die a lot and get reduced to nothing, but you'll (eventually) get back your power back up. No speed-up items in this one though, so get used to the movement of your ship!  

Again, shmups are not something I'm particularly good at articulating about, so I hope you'll forgive the brief nature of this post, but I think it goes to show how much of a force (a-ha) they were in the arcades in the period that Arcade Archives covers that there's so many of them. On the plus side, I believe unless you count Back Fire!, there's only Eight Forces left from the Tecmo side of arcade shmups, so maybe we'll get that in the future~