(writing a real review bc i cant stop thinking about this game, sorry)

My first real experience with Treasure aside from when I tried Radiant Silvergun once and couldn't quite make it past the first stage. It’s a doozy - something you get from a team that’s /really/ confident in the game’s core mechanics but also really willing to see how far they can push their own creation’s boundaries.

There’s new ideas or setpieces introduced at such an insanely fast clip that you can barely mind when one of those ideas falls a bit flat. Certain points (ok I really mean the Dice Palace) could have been a lot less frustrating with some tweaks, but when a dev team is really going for it like Treasure is here, and when controlling the player character feels as good as it does, it’s easy to forgive some slight missteps. And it’s tough to even really call them missteps; all the unforgiving checkpoints and endgame boss rushes seem very much in line with Treasure’s ethos of wanting to have the player meet the game where it’s at and rise to the occasion. They knew what they were doing with that goddamn board game level.

There’s just an insane freedom of movement and options for a run-n-gun platformer game here to the point where I’m sure mastering it feels a little bit like mastering a modern character-action game (THEY ADDED AIR GRABS?). My initial Backloggd review was me just half-jokingly saying ‘they should call rival characters “greens'' instead of vergils”’ in reference to the game’s rival character and recurring boss, and while your Vergils and Jeannes of today certainly have more rizz and general staying power, I think there’s something to be said about how the game was able to fit the whole action-game-rival-battle-sequence trope in a 2D platformer so well. That’s mostly credit to the game allowing you all these options and freedom of mobility. It feels like another example of Treasure being so insanely sure of how the game plays that they were able to fit that sort of thing in and it didn’t feel underwhelming by any stretch (I still ended up kind of cheesing it though with the chaser beam heehee).

And the game’s just charming as hell. Squeezes every drop from the Mega Drive it can to render some really impressive looking boss fights, and has art style that looks admittedly kinda jank at first but really grows on you with its expressiveness the further you play. Some really fun villains and pretty stage backgrounds, particularly in the final stages.

Some highlights:

- The entire Seven Force boss fight
- The airplane that partially leaves the the screen during a boss fight so you’re forced to fight with some verticality/limited mobility
- They just switched genres in the middle of the game and it becomes a shmup for one level?
- One of the jobber villains being We Have M Bison At Home was really funny to me
- The endgame boss rush playing out on a big ol’ security camera monitor the rogue’s gallery of villains are watching, all leaving the control room to challenge you one by one


What a game. Probably going to try out Alien Soldier next. Or Sin and Punishment. Or Contra Hard Corps. Idk

(sidenote: how the hell do you make it through radiant silvergun. Is it me? Do I just need to get good at the game or is there something I'm missing. Please help)

It manages to stay fun 30 years after its release, which is impressive for such a game. Like, play most action games of the era, even the well remembered ones, and they kinda suck, and almost always are on the cheaper side of difficulty. Not this one, tho. It’s harder than a game like this would be nowadays, but not by a whole lot, and it’s snappy great to control. It lacks a little bit of craziness to me, it just looks to ordinary, and while it is a good deal of fun, it misses just a bit of balance here and there and some checkpoints are really punishing, particularly in an early game stage. A late game stage (you’ll probably know which one), however, is absolutely trash, a convoluted mess that I didn’t enjoy in the slightest.

(This is the 87th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

I wasn't really all too familiar with or interested in the run and gun / shoot 'em up genre of video games until I played Contra III: The Alien Wars just a month ago. Based on its score, I have it rated as the 2nd best game I've played out of my 1992 playlist, and that score sounds about right, as it is one of the games I most fondly look back on from that year, and will do so in the future as well I'm sure. When I shared my thoughts about that game at the time, I was recommended to make sure that I check out Gunstar Heroes as well, which I had never heard of before but had already been on my 1993 playlist beforehand, interestingly enough.

Gunstar Heroes released on September 10, 1993 for the Sega Genesis and on Game Gear in 1995. It was produced by Mastao Maegawa, and it is the result of him and some of his colleagues at Konami rejecting an idea of a game (presumably similar to this one) that they had, which led to them quitting at Konami and starting up their own development studio, Treasure. Gunstar Heroes is a run and gun video game that players of, say, Metal Slug and of course Contra games will instantly be familiar with. You run forward on a side-scrolling screen and just shoot up dozens of enemies as explosion fill up the screen, until you reach a boss, learn its patterns and defeat it too, which lets you advance to the next stage.

In its basic form, it's the same style of game. If you enjoy a game such as Contra III, you are sure to enjoy this one as well. If you didn't enjoy Contra III or similar games at all, you won't enjoy Gunstar Heroes either.

What makes Gunstar Heroes stand out in this genre in my opinion is its presentation and the variety of weapons you can use. Contra III had about a handful of attacks that you could use and gave you two slots to put attacks onto. Get hit, and you lose an attack but can switch to the other slot. In Gunstar Heroes, you also have two slots, though you don't lose the attack in a slot if you get hit. Plus, these attacks don't just work individually, but you can also choose to use the combined effect of these, which gives you even more powerful attacks, which differ in damage output, range and firing directions. There are over a dozen combination to use this way, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, which adds a lot of replayability to how you want to challenge the tougher fights in this game.

The presentation is also worth highlighting as I mentioned. Some of the bosses look really interesting, like the Bravoo Man, Melon Bread or "Seven Force", which can take upon a variety of forms out of which a couple are randomly chosen whenever you face it. There are also some very cleverly designed levels, such as the final boss rush where the screen is presented as a "TV" on which the bad guys collectively watch you fight their guys. Whenever you defeat one of them, they get mad and you can see the main antagonist sending out the next boss out to face you. Another really well designed level is the "Dice Palace", which reminded me of Cuphead's King Dice boss fight. You roll a dice to see how many platforms you can advance, and each platform has either a boss fight or an item room for you. The bosses vary in difficulty, but most are pretty easy on "normal" difficulty. The second to last platform has you start over (just like in Cuphead) and I had the pleasure to step on it once, losing about 10 minutes of progress. Each major boss you defeat gives you one of four gems, and there is a funny scene that plays with the Dice Palace boss, who, once defeated, throws out what looks like the "red gem" but is actually a bomb. So I had the boss beat, but didn't know it was a bomb, so it hit me and I died, which means I had to start over the Dice Palace. Made me mad at the time, but was hilarious in hindsight.

Graphically, the game looks more than serviceable for the Sega Genesis and makes up for lack of high-tier production values with great enemy design. The game's soundtrack overall is pretty good. It has a few pretty average tracks and is mostly overshadowed by the constant sound of explosions. The highlight for me here though was the "theme of Seven Force", which, as I would like to eloquently say, "slaps".

OVERALL: 72/100

This is a real “throw darts at a dart board with post-it-notes” kinda game. That may sound like an insult, and in other circumstances it might be, but if you can pull it off with the same swagger and technical wizardry that Treasure’s 1993 debut has you can get away with it.

Gunstar Heroes is, on its surface, a pretty simple sidescrolling shooter à la Contra. This makes sense, given this team’s pedigree of working on Konami sequels prior to forming Treasure. However, there lies just under the surface a generous amount of moves and weapon combinations that makes this game feel as free and fluid as a modern character action game. It feels like Treasure put truly everything the team could think of into moving and attacking. The result is certainly not balanced (pick free shot, and homing+lightning if you want what is essentially easy mode), but it allows the player some incredible experimentation.

Man, this one's tough. At the same time, a lot of what it does is my shit. The setpieces and boss fights in this one is like if Contra III went into maximum overdrive, just absolutely stopped giving a fuck. "Seven Force" is a legendary boss fight, especially when fought on the Hardest difficulty where you get to see it go through all its phases. The rest of the game holds up pretty well too, but honestly, you really wanna play it just for Seven Force alone.

Still, even on lower difficulties, Gunstar kicked my ass like nothing else. This is a hectic as hell run 'n gun, and one that I don't think I could ever master. But I'll always come back to it for its sheer spectacle. Treasure has only just started making games, but they've already hit a pretty high bar on how to create unconventional bangers. Checking out more of their catalogue is super recommended, as is playing Gunstar Heroes.

Cleared on March 5th, 2023 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 4/160)

The game is very much like Contra, and if you know what Contra is, then you fire in multiple directions, run around and shoot things, all while using some fun weaponry. In fact, the people behind this were ex-Konami developers who went on to form their own studio and this was their debut game, a game to outmatch Contra in every way and well, I will say it's got its own charm. It has the advantage of being fair to play since you don't die in one hit and you get increased health over the course of the game to make later challenges manageable, and you do get unlimited continues... but I still have my problems with this game compared to Contra Hard Corps which came out one year later.

My biggest vendetta with this game is the lack of the ability to switch between Free or Fixed shot. Contra Hard Corps figured this out by pressing a button to switch between one or the other, but here, you have to choose one of two characters that represent these modes and stick with them. You either have to play a guy who can't be bothered to stand still while moving or a guy who is too afraid he'll miss if he moves. Not exactly a hallmark of a great soldier, and it becomes a bit of liability for certain boss fights where you feel you could've avoided an attack if you could move or just better able to aim by standing still.

I also didn't really like the majority of the common enemies just trying to approach you grapple you up in melee because it doesn't make sense to me. If you're facing someone in a gun, you don't just bull rush them, what do you think is going to happen? Sure some of them do shoot, but the ones that approach you in melee to grab you are just weird to me.

But other than that, this game is pretty much what you'd expect out of Contra except with a more colorful artstyle and a large variety of weapons. And by variety, I mean 16 different weapons in the game. You have 4 Elements that you can choose which include Homing, Lightning, Flame, and Machine Gun. Once you pick your starter, you can pick up an orb representing one of those four to create a new weapon and you'll have opportunities to try them out even ones not related to your starter weapon. They are fun to mix and match, and play around with.

That said, once you find out what might be the stupidest combination in the game, all bets are off. You pretty much just won the entire game. Homing and Lightning gives you a lightning fast laser shot that homes in on an enemy. You don't need to aim, just hold down a button, watch enemies get desecrated all around, dodge attacks, and that's it. The damage and mobility ratio it provides is absurd.

I know I mostly addressed the game's flaws, but I still really enjoy it. Like I said, it's a much more fair Contra. It has sharp and responsive controls and the difficulty never feels like it's cheapening you out. The bosses are really fun too.