XP Arcade: Night Striker
XP Arcade: Night Striker
This 1989 arcade classic only just made its way out of Japan, and of course it's in an inferior form.
This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Chances are good you’ve heard of Sega’s extensive Super Scaler library of arcade games: classics like (Super) Hang-on, OutRun, Space Harrier, and plenty of others that utilized sprite scaling to create pseudo 3D in arcades as early as the mid-80s. It’s technology that couldn’t even be fully replicated in the living room in the next generation of consoles, as attempts to do so on both the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo proved — Mode 7 was good, but the SNES wasn’t quite powerful enough to move at Space Harrier speeds, and the Genesis wouldn’t even have the basic tech to attempt such a thing until the Sega CD add-on brought it to the table.
Less known, for reasons such as “was never released in arcades or consoles in any form outside of Japan between 1989 and 2021,” is Taito’s own Super Scaler on-rails experience: Night Striker. It doesn’t bring anything explicitly new to the genre, other than its look and that it incorporates branching pathways, but you don’t always have to be brand new in order to be a great time. Night Striker hit all the notes it needed to in order to create an exceptional entry within the Super Scaler on-rails shoot-em-up subgenre: its greatest fault is simply that no one outside of Japan and people who pay attention to what’s staying inside of Japan even knew about it.
Night Striker actually does have an international release now — I didn’t just forget what year it currently is when I wrote the above. The thing is that it managed to create two issues in one release: it’s only available on the Sega Genesis Mini 2, which had a lower production run than the original for what were cited as supply chain issues, and it’s the inferior Mega CD version of the game. (That’s the European and Japanese name for the Sega CD add-on, to go with its home system being the Mega Drive outside of North America.)
It’s not like, a tiny bit inferior to the arcade version (or a later enhanced console release of Night Striker), either. It’s straight-up rough to look at, to the point that it shows you just how ahead of the time arcade Super Scaler games were. Something like Guerilla War obviously looked better and more detailed on 16-bit arcade hardware than it did on the 8-bit NES, but the issue with Night Striker wasn’t the number of bits in the hardware. Both the Genesis and Night Striker’s 1989 arcade board were 16-bit — Night Striker ran on the 16-bit Taito Z system, first released in 1987. The difference was all in the capabilities for sprite scaling within the respective hardware: that of the Mega CD had to be kind of one size fits all at the time it shipped, whereas arcade developers could tweak as needed for a specific game for an improved iteration of the same board, like Sega did when moving on from the board that powered Space Harrier and Hang-on to the one that made OutRun look and run the way it did.
The reason the way Night Striker on the Mega CD looks matters so much is how it impacts the game’s performance. Guerilla War was mentioned above for a reason beyond just the fact the arcade version looks more impressive: the developers, when porting it to the NES, had to work around the limitations of the console hardware, but found ways to do so that made the living room version its own experience. And a very playable one at that. Night Striker on the Mega CD, however, is a pretty faithful port of the arcade original gameplay-wise, at the cost of graphical fidelity. The price was too high, though: while performance is there in terms of a stable frame rate and they didn’t cut back too much on the number of objects on screen, every single one of them in the game is hyperpixelated to the point it’s difficult to tell what anything is.
Are you shooting at an enemy off in the distance, or wasting shots firing at the explosion from one you already hit? Are your shots even going where they are supposed to — it’s hard to tell with each one its own pixelated blob, cluttering up entire sections of the screen. The backgrounds are… fine, but still tough to suss out just what they are, and the game moves so fast that it’s kind of to its detriment. HyperZone, powered by the SNES’ Mode 7 tech, is a slower experience than Night Striker, but it worked because of that: you could tell what everything was, who was firing and where, and the tech all looked impressive. The Mega CD’s Night Striker is certainly playable, and the performance is solid, as said, but visually it’s confusing in a way that makes it less than it should be — it’s the kind of port that makes you realize what the hardware is not capable of more than what it is capable of.
The Playstation port does suffer from performance issues, despite the move to a 32-bit system, so you don’t necessarily want to give that a try, either. No, the clear non-arcade winner for Night Striker is that of the Sega Saturn, known as Night Striker S. Ving brought the arcade classic to the Saturn, which was kind of their whole deal for a bit there. Ving had a partnership going with Taito to re-release their arcade games on the Saturn, which is how Layer Section, Metal Black, Bubble Symphony, Elevator Action Returns, and others all ended up on Sega’s console. Night Striker was another one of those, and it received an exclusive Saturn mode that added additional levels, to boot.
It’s not visually enhanced despite the move to a 32-bit system, but it might as well be in comparison to the previous Night Striker console releases. The Saturn had the horsepower and the ability to run Night Striker the way it was meant to be run, which is more than the Mega CD or Playstation could say. Here’s Night Strike on the Mega CD…
…and here it is on the Saturn:
The Mega CD version looks like an unfinished prototype of a game, while the Saturn one looks like, well, Night Striker. (I will say that the Saturn video actually looks a little worse here than on actual hardware and on a CRT, but, this is what YouTube has to offer. Go get a Saturn and softmod it, people.)
Night Striker S: that’s the one you should find and play. City Connection has been porting quite a few Saturn games to the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4, including Taito joints, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Night Striker S… S-Tribute sometime in the near future. That’s a reason to be excited, so long as the finished product feels a lot more like Layer Section than like the very offputting job they did launching this series with their multiple Cotton entries.
Why should you want to play Night Striker, though? It’s a hell of an on-rails Super Scaler shoot-em-up, for one. You’ve got a flying car with energy cannons attached, and you use it to complete a series of missions in different locations, via branching pathways. You can say it’s a little like OutRun in that regard — the branching pathways, not the flying car or energy cannons bits — but you could also point out that it’s like Taito’s own Darius, which predates Night Striker by a few years and released less than six months after OutRun. At the least, there’s some shared credit there to give.
Unlike Darius, though, the various branching pathways aren’t all unique ones. Sometimes your car will return to a location you’ve been to before, just later (or earlier) than last time, but the levels won’t play exactly the same or anything. Just the location is the same: enemy layouts are different, as it’s a different mission you’re completing. So sure, you might be flying over the water with a bridge in the background once again, but it’s not like the patterns for dodging, firing, etc. will be the same.
Your flying car with energy cannons attached is also armored, meaning you have an energy shield that can take a few hits before you need to use up a continue. At the end of a stage, you’ll recover some measure of shielding depending on the options you’ve set before playing. The default is to get just one hit back for the next stage, but you can set it to be more generous than that. And your shield doesn’t cap at the five hits you start with, either, so you can stack them up beyond that. Consider them bonus lives you receive for simply surviving a stage.
You’ll be happy about the extra lives, as Night Striker has you completing just six stages on a single run among the 21 in the game, but they get pretty hectic and busy: combined with the game’s general speed, it’s a lot to take in at once. You always start in Stage A, but then you can pick between B and C, kicking off the lettered branching that’ll carry you to your eventual destination. So you can play Night Striker quite a few times before you see all it has to see, just like the various Darius games or Star Fox 64 (though it certainly doesn’t have the same kind of depth within said levels as the latter on-rails shooter).
The whole time you’re playing, you’ll be treated to the sounds of Taito’s house band, Zuntata. The only thing missing from the Saturn release is the arranged version of the soundtrack that was included in the Mega CD’s release, but you still get the typical Zuntata greatness of the original.
It’s the perfect kind of sound for this futuristic game with a flying, shielded car (with energy cannons). The speed and energy of the music matches the intensity of the game itself, and even when things slow down, it’s only briefly while you catch your breath before a boss arrives on the scene for what is always a tense affair. Night Striker’s boss fights aren’t super difficult, but things can go wrong or right in a real hurry, and you’ll feel the pressure to avoid the former throughout. The music for the bosses certainly matches up with the hectic feeling that the design of those bouts creates.
Like plenty of other Zuntata works, Night Striker’s soundtrack was also sold independent of the game it was written for, and you can still find copies floating around on the secondhand market all this time later.
It’s a real shame that a game as enjoyable as Night Striker has been buried for so long: it was a successful arcade hit in Japan, enough so that it ended up with three console ports once the technology had caught up enough to give it a go, and the last of them is wonderful even if it didn’t attempt to bolster anything in the presentation (outside of a CGI intro) with the move to a 32-bit system. It’s finally officially arrived in North America, but on a system few people will own, in a form no one should be particularly enthused about. Maybe City Connection will get there, and more people can realize they’ve missed out on a great on-rails shooter experience for decades now: a re-release of the Mega CD version of the game certainly tells us Taito is still thinking about Night Striker, even if its lack of inclusion on various compilations or as an Arcade Archives release suggested otherwise before the fall of 2022.
And, if for whatever reason, City Connection isn’t going to release Night Striker on the PS4 and Switch through their S-Tribute series, then Hamster should really get on working out that licensing deal with Taito so we can all enjoy a classic with a few quality of life updates for $8.
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