I'm... not sure why I finished this? 1941 is the only game in this system that I actually thought was "decent", with everything else ranging from incredibly mediocre to just plain bad (and Ghouls 'n Ghosts just filtered me), but this is the only one of those I actually beat. I did rewind the hell out of it, but what compelled me to waste one hour on this? No idea.

It's just bad. Enemies come from both directions, with not much you can do. Your ship is slooooow, only getting faster with pick-ups - at which point your ship might become too damn fast and hard to control. There is a stage with magnetic floor and ceiling which is a complete disgrace. I could not hurt the final boss at all, and can only assume it requires a specific weapon type - of which you can't fully select, enemies drop those.

It's the only game in the system with unlimited continues though... at least it has that.

Horizontal shoot em up. Looks good, often feels made partly to show the parallax scrolling capability of the SuperGrafx. You have main forward shot and can hold attack to charge up a shield to cover the front of your ship that can destroy enemies and projectiles (when it feels like it ?), three types of weapon can be picked up and powered up and the more unique feature is having up to four satellites follow you around that can be switched to follow you, attack on their own, or rotate around you destroying enemies that they hit.

Looks good, decent music, the control of the satellites is a good mechanic though they easily get stuck on things when sent off on their own. Your base speed is too slow and needs to be improved by speed powerups, with the first pickup giving an acceptable feel to movement. Death will spawn you back at the game's last checkpoint with no powerups and with the fairly relentless enemies and small surprise bullets or attacks that you have a good chance of not being able to see coming this does up the difficulty quite a bit.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1561160828123918336

PC Engine shmupdevs understood the genre sauce but goddamn do a lot of these games totally fail to deliver compelling level design. In hindsight this should be a cool tech demo for the extra boss object scale and parallax you can achieve with the SuperGrafx's extra VRAM power, but it ain't all that great as a shmup. Aldyne's two trains of design are totally incompatible with each other: Enemies that chase you from every direction, and AI-powered options that refuse to do their job correctly. So many microscopic pests killing you from behind because your options didn't happen to be on the same line of sight. There's so many vile candidates for Snowbeast award here: The giant stage 3 cannons that shoot screen-covering lasers, the turrets in stage 4 that only take damage when attacking and also resist most of the weapons, the eels in stage 6 that snipe you while you're stuck to electric walls, but the trophy has to go to the red hoppers in stage 5 that not only divebomb you randomly, but shoot you down if you somehow avoid their headbonks. Had to drop at the last boss because I got there with a weapon that couldn't kill it, and then my checkpoint took me back to an unwinnable spot.

Games like this make me feel a lot less guilty about my Genesis fanboying.