Solar Striker

"A last resort... if that."

EXCITEMENT! ACTION! DANGER!

Solar Striker has none of this. Let’s try again.

SHOOTING! REPETITION! BLACK AND WHITE!

Closer. Solar Striker is like the boring math teacher you had back in high school (or still have, for all I know), droning on and on while wasting your time and making you think of all the other things you could be doing. It’s going to be hard to describe this game and still maintain some scrap of excitement.

The best way to describe it: Space Invaders with a boss, though it comes to us almost two decades later and with no excuse for this simplicity. Give it this-- it’s faster-paced and you can move up and down, but there’s little reason to. Enemies come from the top of the screen and move downward. You need to shoot straight upwards at them. Also consider that the enemies and yourself are fairly large, creating pop-up in a vertical shooter. Solution: maximize the distance between the enemy and yourself by staying at the bottom of the screen so you can actually react to them when they suddenly appear. If you’re good, you won’t even see your enemies: they’ll get a pixel of the way onto the screen and explode.

After shooting the legions of alien kamikaze spaceships, a boss will show up to mildly annoy you with a clear pattern. Any sense of chaos that would accompany a shooter such as this is just an illusion: things fly in from the top and you make them explode as soon as they’re visible (and in some cases, not) by positioning yourself underneath the streams of bad guys.

Then comes level 4, where suddenly all the enemies learn how to shoot.

Whew! And here I was thinking that this game was bad!

Oh, sorry, false alarm. See, if you dodge these attacks, you’re no longer right underneath them. Seeing as how you can only fire straight ahead, if you’re not in their line of fire you can no longer hit them. And so the waves of opponents pile onto the screen after that first missed shot, firing and firing as you dodge with varying success—but you’re clearly unequipped to return fire. The bosses past that point compound the game’s shortcomings, as they have one weak point shielded by armor composed almost entirely of constantly firing guns. Attempt to dodge the shots, and you cannot shoot the boss. Attempt to shoot the boss, and you cannot dodge the shots.

Catch-22: The Shooter.

Graphics are basic as basic can get; the sound is passable but hardly pleasing. Your controls are ultra-simplistic, with two buttons both used to fire upwards. It’s not two different kinds of bullets, no, just two buttons used for the same thing. I have games that look, play, and sound better on my calculator. My calculator is also considerably more discreet than a giant gray chunk of plastic when I want to play these kinds of games in the most academic of moments.

Solar Striker does gain a few points in the fact that it’s a last resort. After Tetris has grown stale, this is usually second best. There have been many moments where I’ve stared at this puny cartridge (inside and out) and thought to myself, ''so, it’s come down to this.'' In every new situation where I have this and don’t want it, I’ve tried to improve it myself: actually trying to move past the lower half of the screen (no dice on that one), hooking it up to my car speakers with a tape adapter, and even alternating fire buttons for no good reason.

Nothing works. If I’m playing this, there is nothing else to do; there’s no other source of entertainment. The Newsweek and People magazines in a waiting room will have been read, I will have finished the book I was reading, and I will have thoroughly played Tetris. It’s boring, it’s frustrating, and it’s really about the most basic shooter on the face of the planet, but it’s always been there for me.

That’s worth something.

Overall: 2.5 / 10
A final option; nothing more.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 10/23/02, Updated 10/23/02