Title: Psikyo Shooting Stars Alpha
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Developer: Psikyo (original games)/Zerodiv (Switch versions)
Publisher: NISA (NA and EU)/City Connection (JP and eShop WW)
Release Date: January 21st, 2020 (NA)
File Size: 640MB
Review copy provided by NIS America
Time for my first NISA review of 2020! This game is actually a 6-game compilation of Psikyo games previously released on the eShop by Zerodiv. The games are Strikers 1945, Strikers 1945 II, Strikers 1945 III (the only one not on the eShop), Sol Divide, Dragon Blaze, and Zero Gunner 2. All of these came out during the 90’s and early 2000’s. How does this collection fare on Switch? Read on and find out. 🙂
Here’s the game selection menu.
As mentioned, this is a 6-game collection featuring shmups (shoot-em-ups) created by the late Psikyo. Zerodiv ended up acquiring the IPs and started porting a bunch of them to Switch. One odd thing is, while these are all shmups, four are your typical vertical shmups where you shoot upward and at whatever comes your way, where as Sol Divide is actually a horizontal shmup and Zero Gunner 2 is multi-directional, able to scroll and shoot in all directions. Just a note that all games are on the cart, and are also in one icon on the Switch’s menu. This wasn’t the case in I believe the very first 4-pack releases in Asia? You popped in the cart and then four icons just get added to the home screen, one for each game. Thankfully that’s not the case here.
Strikers 1945
Let’s start with the Strikers 1945 games, with three of them here in all. All play very similarly, if not too similarly. These take place during as implied 1945 during World War II, so you already can imagine what to expect here. You’re flying a plane shooting other planes and tanks… with some transforming into robots. You can tell this isn’t historically accurate, crazy right? 😛 Anyway, you pick from a selection of planes at the start, as well as the difficulty from multiple choices. As you shoot down enemies, power-ups (that show a “P”) will hover around. Grabbing this lets you fire larger and larger barrages of gunfire. Here’s one key difference between the first vs. the latter two games; only the latter two’s power-ups give you homing missiles from what I’ve seen. In all you can collect bombs (hovering “B” items) for a large scale attack in front of you. You’ll also want to collect gold bars (and medals in Strikers 1945 III) for more points.
Strikers 1945 II
Next let’s talk about Dragon Blaze. This is a similar game, but you’re flying dragons shooting at more fantasy enemies. If you’ve played the Strikers 1945 games above, you’ll be super familiar with this game as it functions very similarly. However there’s now a story with multiple characters and their dragons to choose from. Sol Divide is where things deviate. This is a notably darker, more western-style “RPG” setting and concept, but again it’s a horizontal shmup. This heavily reminds me the Monkey King and Saint games on Wii (the ones Starfish SD developed and UFO Interactive published, remember those?). You also choose from a selection of characters and not only do you have to shoot and dodge enemies by scrolling to the right this time, but you can also do a melee attack as one example. AND you have a health bar this time which you can heal with pick-ups earned by beating enemies. Bosses pop up which also have their own health bar, AND you can also use spell attacks for more damage via pick-ups as well.
Strikers 1945 III
Zero Gunner 2 is the most advanced game in the collection. This is the only 3D game of the bunch and is actually from the Sega NAOMI arcade hardware. In fact, Zerodiv had to rebuild the game from the ground-up on Switch due to too much of the source code being lost. Anyway, this is more of a 360-degree shmup where you can choose which direction to fire, but the turning mechanics is… questionable. You have to hold a button and then move slowly around a “target marker” in from of you. Also, instead of just shooting things, you actually have all of these energy points flying out of enemies you’re trying to collect as well, but here’s the catch; if you stop firing, they will gravitate towards you. So there’s a bit of risk vs. reward here. Still, this game does feel slower to navigate IMO than the others and the rotation mechanic will take quite a bit to master. But the game, like all the others, has a difficulty option for a variety of players.
Sol Divide
What’s super cool about the collection is the wealth of options available for ALL games. In the four vertical games, you’ve got rotation options in any 90-degree angle, so if you have a flip grip, you can play in TATE mode on that! Or pretend to be Claude from Fire Emblem Three Houses and play the games upside down! 😉 Every game has options for increasing lives/credits, filters for that old-school basic CRT blur effect and scanlines, custom button inputs, volume adjusters. You can even reset the scoreboards if you accidentally enter the wrong 3-character name upon getting a game over without issue. It’s nuts how many options there are. On one note for Zero Gunner 2, there’s the custom sort of “retro” mode instead where the game takes on a weird… green tone with not just scanlines and blurring, but also a weird dark-shaded boarder around the screen. It looks like this. Oh and Sol Divide instead of screen rotation, has an option to stretch the gameplay screen into that old “4:3-to-16:9” stretch mode by getting rid of the wallpaper. It’s weird.
Dragon Blaze
Visually obviously each game is somewhat different. All run in HD and look nice and crisp, with the pixels seemingly being un-blurred when filters are turned off. You can turn off the wallpaper on the left and right side of the screen in all but Zero Gunner 2 (which is native widescreen). However while you can get rid of the backgrounds, HUD outside the gameplay remains unfortunately, BUT they do disappear when in TATE mode! As mentioned the filter options are always nifty. All run at a locked 60fps, however Zero Gunner 2, while it runs perfectly, I noticed a stutter when the mission titles come up, likely since it’s loading. But that’s the only bit. Also Zero Gunner 2 is the only one with a loading screen upon boot-up. The others are very quick to load. Makes sense since this is a 3D NAOMI game vs. 16/32-bit 2D games.
Zero Gunner 2
Audio-wise it’s good. Music and sound effects are crisp and sound like what you’d expect in a shmup. I liked the music in Zero Gunner 2 in particular as it really does capture that golden age of Sega/Arcade gaming of the Dreamcast/NAOMI era. Again each game has volume adjusters for different aspects, like sound effects and music, and voices if the game has any. Not much else to say here honestly.
The option menu for Strikers 1945. This is mostly the same for all games.
Overall this is a pretty neat package. There’s no online leaderboards so that can be a negative to some, but you could always just make a thread somewhere and post a screenshot of your score or something, so that’s one work-around. I also wish they combined both this and the second collection, subtitled Bravo into one and thus have been a 12-in-1 collection, but both are $50 CDN on the eShop, so it surely was a price vs. profit reason. The wealth of customization for all games cannot be overstated, it’s really neat how much it let’s you personalize each game to your liking. Also, there is another version of Strikers 1945 on the eShop but not here, and that’s ACA NEO GEO Strikers 1945 Plus. It looks pretty different from the others and may be worth a look on its own. As for the collection, well you decide if each is worth it here, on their own (sans Strikers 1945 III), or wait for a sale, you know the drill. 😛
You’ll Love:
+ A pretty decent collection of solid games. Zero Gunner 2 being the neatest of the bunch with it being a NAOMI game IMO.
+ A truckload of customization options for all games. Button inputs, audio options, credit number changer, the list goes on.
+ Difficulty options for all games allows even newcomers to give them a shot.
+ Has cloud-save support.
+ Has screenshot and video capture support.
You’ll Hate:
– No online leaderboards can be a negative for some.
– There’s no real bonus features. So don’t expect this to be a Digital Eclipse-style compilation. You get the 6 games, and that’s it. It’s really just the eShop games together on one cart.
– Strikers 1945 III is exclusive to the collection, so if you have all the other games, you kind of have to fork over that full cost for it alone. Best to just buy the collection from the start if you haven’t bought any of the games yet.
Score: 8/10
