Starblade

Save your home planet, fighting mechanized enemies.

The enemy mechanized planet "Red Eye" Is approaching your galaxy's home planet. Flying in the starfighter "Geo Sword", it is your mission to execute Operation: Starblade, and save your home planet.

Three discrete missions. The first focused upon making your way through the approaching enemy fleet and getting to the planet to begin with. The second, rather harder, remined me of the assault upon the Death Star at times...but with better firepower on the part of the ground emplacements. After destroying the reactor and watching a nice movie, you entered the third and final mission; making your way back towards Earth, through the rather-annoyed fleet from Redeye....the final enemy was, of course, the mothership that had escaped before Redeye's reactor blew. After defeating that, you were treated to a exhilirating (At least to me, my adrenaline was still treating my heart like a jackhammer after spending a dollar or two in the process of saving Earth) view of your fighter joining formation with two other ships and flying past the camera, doing a slow roll...then given views of a few passing capital ships as the credits rolled.

There were a few interesting features to this game. It was an enclosed booth with a large curved projection screen in front of the bench. This had the effect of making the game text nearly impossible to read, except for such items as the logo and the high scoring, and of course the title screen. Control was by means of a large anchored gun turret of the sort one might expect to see in a water park...moving it around the screen triggered crosshair motion as well. Two firing buttons existed, one on each handle of the gun. Although it was a rail-shooter and exhibited notable polygon fadein, not to mention opaque sprite explosions when the player was hit, two speakers behind the contoured chair and nicely-utilized strobe lights concealed to the side of the screen provided wonderful feedback. Another interesting aspect was that you actually COULD shoot the big ships that looked like scenery...although hard to notice in the near-constant firefight, anything that had a color-cycling rectangle was shootable for a good deal of bonus points. Apparently, the actual geometry data for the game was loaded "on the fly" from a laserdisc mounted under the player's seat.

There is a PSX version, named Starblade Alpha.