Space Harrier Review

       I've never been able to understand games where you are behind the back flying forward. Be it Star Fox or certain segments of Philosoma, I've never been able to dodge shots or aim properly in games that use that viewpoint.

       That certainly holds true for Space Harrier, an old arcade game from 1985 (making it exactly as old as me!) that I played on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. Now the reason you want to play Space Harrier is that the title screen features a dude sitting on the shoulder of a robot with a huge gun waving crazily at you. Next to them is a wooly mammoth with one giant eye. The game is full of this kind of crazy character design, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

       You play as a guy running on the ground who can also fly freely through the air. He is constantly running forward “into” the screen. The backgrounds have a scrolling effect, and the enemy sprites have a great effect where they get larger and larger as you get closer to them. You shoot with square, X, or O, your choice (no triangle, obvs), and move around with the d-pad. You shoot enemies and dodge their incoming fire. At the end of the level, you face a giant, weird boss. That is it.

       Like I said before, I have a lot of trouble playing games with this view. It could just be me, but I think it's because it's a bad viewpoint, or at least on that is hard to do right. It's certainly not done right here. It's super hard to aim or dodge. You just get hit constantly and miss constantly. Unless of course I am just incompetant at this type of game, which is possible. Fortunately, on SUGC, the game is set to free-play mode, so you can continue as much as you want to blow through the whole game. It took me about 15 continues (that's $3.75 in quarters, not bad!).

       Blowing through with infinite continues is how I recommend playing this game. I started to get bored even doing that. As an artifact of '80's game and art design, it's a lot of fun to witness. As a game, there's just not enough there to warrant much play at all since the bad viewpoint/collision detection/whatever makes it really hard to improve yourself. If I saw it the arcade, I would definitely pop some quarters in for the experience, but it's not a game I'm going to keep playing. It's a Mediocre Game, tier 3.