"Solar Striker" (Game Boy)

An excellent shoot-em-up game for the Game Boy. While the fourth level gets unbelievably difficult, the ending of the game isn't much.

Producer Gunpei Yokoi (rest in peace) gives a shoot-em-up game a shot with a title released during Nintendo's official release of the popular handheld console, the Game Boy: Solar Striker.

Shooting games like these really take you back, especially if you grew up hanging around arcades. Solar Striker ports that goodness into the Game Boy for everyone to enjoy at the palms of their hands. Being that the popular Super Mario Land broke the million-selling record, being awarded the Million Seller gold medal, why hasn't anyone brought the attention, nor a medal, to this game? It just so happens that this game had the same fate as Alleyway—the very first game released for the Game Boy.

By today, you'd think a game with six stages isn't anything to scoff at. Heck, some may think it's too easy or the game wasn't fully complete. We wish we could agree.

These six stages don't mess around: Getting the enemies' patterns is the biggest key to winning. Keep shooting and shooting, while obtaining power-ups, indicated by Power Pods—a cell-like hexagon with the letter P—and you increase the power of your bullets, shooting through enemies left and right. Plow through the enemies and you reach the final boss of that stage. Keep this up until the sixth stage, where you fight a mid-boss, first boss and the second, final boss.

The biggest struggle we've encountered happened to be at Stage 4. The shots fired toward us during the boss fight was an incredibly difficult manuever, being that you have to time your dodging AND shoot the center body of the boss. With about 8 bullets fired toward you, with very little space to move, it's no wonder that this frustrated video gamers. Some had it down and were able to avoid it perfectly, but for us, it was tough—upsettingly tough.

As a matter of fact, for the sake of wrapping the game up, we shamingly—admittedly so—used a cheat for this game. While the video gaming community shuns and ignores other video gamers the moment they use some sort of cheat code to finish a game, the blood pressure was getting too high. Even using a cheat to charge our way through the game, we still struggled with the enemies' attacks and the boss fights (we used the infinite lives cheat). As we finally made it to the ending, it was nothing more than a page from the Super Mario Land ending: Have a small cut scene, roll the credits, then bring the player back to the title screen.

After beating the game, there is a more difficult mode featuring more enemies. We, too, played through that, with a cheat of course, and found it to be an incredibly difficult and an unforgiving challenge. We can't imagine anyone being able to plow through without a cheat (perhaps, it's a game we would like to suggest to retro video gamers who live stream on YouTube). Anyhow, we went and finished the game, and found nothing different in the game's ending.

Other than that the retro feel of playing a Game Boy game, let alone satisfying fans of shoot-em-ups, there's isn't much room drool-worthy enough for one's appetite to come back and play again. You just shoot, shoot, shoot, and barely get some sort of honorable badge that makes you look like the envious one among others.

If you haven't heard or played this game, we recommend it, especially for fans of shooting games. Approach with a low expectation, and given its tough challenge by Stage 4, we're certain you'll be better off playing something a little better, like Galaga or Space Invaders.

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he started blogging in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, plus playing old video/MS-DOS games, digital video archiving, listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

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