Bio-ship Paladin is a 1990 horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up arcade game. It was later ported to the Sega Mega Drive. While the game is essentially a standard horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up, it has an innovation that makes it unique in the genre. The player flies a spaceship (specifically, a bioship) which has the standard forward guns to be found in all horizontal scrollers, but it also possesses a weapon that can be manually targeted with a crosshair, in the same manner as in the game Missile Command. This allows the player to fire in any direction with pinpoint accuracy, and adds an extra level of strategy to the game. The game saw an almost arcade perfect port on the Sega Mega Drive. What few changes there were actually enhanced the look of the game such as added parallax scrolling backgrounds in level 2.
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The added crosshair controls don't add much to the overall gameplay in this one, which is a bit on the boring side.
Novel concept but maybe the worst execution conceivable, makes SNES kusoge shmups like Imperium and D-Force look like gold in comparison.
Bio-Ship Paladin is a very strange game - enormously slow, with a defensive gameplay style similar to missile command. It drags on for an incredible length of time, not just from the perspective of the slow scrolling and movement, but also the sheer number of stages (there's like ten) and the fact that the game only has like 3 songs. As other players have noted, it's comically rigid, full of random ambushes that seem bafflingly impossible for you to dodge the first time through. (The boss of Stage 3 comes to mind). And yet, there's something weirdly engrossing about the whole experience.
I guess that fundamentally, the way the game is just so different from any other shmup I've ever played appeals to me. I think the idea of a game like Bio-Ship Paladin but with a bit more budget and thought put into it would be extremely cool. What I find most interesting about the game, though, is this sort of... uh... Dark Souls - esque "you WILL die, deal with it" energy to the whole game, the exact same thing that makes it frustrating to play. It's kind of... I hate to say this, because it's obviously incredibly silly to refer to a hyper-idealized genre game this way... realistic?
Okay, okay, so I know you're probably scratching your head at that. What I mean is, Bio-Ship Paladin feels like plodding battleship combat more than speedy movie thriller action 90% of the time. The bosses are of a classic style where instead of shifting from form to more and more dynamic form, instead they usually start out with a ton of weapons that you shred off of them until they're pitiful, so the fights start out overwhelmingly hard and become easy once you've deleted all your opponent's gun turrets. And that sort of all-or-nothing, throwing everything you've got at your opponent, hoping its enough combat really reminds me of how real combat works... There's a sense of sad, trudging, despair-filled warfare in Paladin that's exacerbated by the grimy Genesis palette and the simple, melancholy soundtrack. In the end titles of the game you're presented with a listing of all the bosses you fought the entire time, and in an extremely unusual move, every boss has a listed crew count. There's no visible humans in the game at all, no cool protagonists babbling "Let's attack aggressively!" in lieu of a plot or fulfilling the local cute anime girl quota, no intro cutscene explaining the stakes, the only presence of humanity is their reduction to numbers in the end, a quiet procession of kill counts. More than anything that's what makes this feel like a depiction of heartless warfare to me, the casual mention of the fact that hundreds of people were manning the death-raining war machines that your two pilots had to shoot down and kill. It's pretty interesting.
Oh, speaking of two pilots. I think my favorite thing about Paladin was playing it with my brother. It's much easier as a two-player game for obvious reasons, a single player has to constantly switch modes to play the game (no twin stick capabilities on the Genesis!) which makes it way harder to handle all the ambushes it throws at you. But with two players you have the added element of communication, you actually have to talk to your partner to discuss threats and priorities. This is another aspect that feels powerfully simulationist, like an early 20th century warplane pilot having to get the help of their gunner. Bio-Ship Paladin is simultaneously a sterile space battle game where machines trade lasers with other machines without a human in sight, and a game defined entirely by the idea that to some degree, even if you can't see it, those mechanical behemoths are all about the people within them. Thousands die. That's life!
Also I like the thing where your ship gets larger and easier to hit as you get more health. Thanks for reading.
I guess that fundamentally, the way the game is just so different from any other shmup I've ever played appeals to me. I think the idea of a game like Bio-Ship Paladin but with a bit more budget and thought put into it would be extremely cool. What I find most interesting about the game, though, is this sort of... uh... Dark Souls - esque "you WILL die, deal with it" energy to the whole game, the exact same thing that makes it frustrating to play. It's kind of... I hate to say this, because it's obviously incredibly silly to refer to a hyper-idealized genre game this way... realistic?
Okay, okay, so I know you're probably scratching your head at that. What I mean is, Bio-Ship Paladin feels like plodding battleship combat more than speedy movie thriller action 90% of the time. The bosses are of a classic style where instead of shifting from form to more and more dynamic form, instead they usually start out with a ton of weapons that you shred off of them until they're pitiful, so the fights start out overwhelmingly hard and become easy once you've deleted all your opponent's gun turrets. And that sort of all-or-nothing, throwing everything you've got at your opponent, hoping its enough combat really reminds me of how real combat works... There's a sense of sad, trudging, despair-filled warfare in Paladin that's exacerbated by the grimy Genesis palette and the simple, melancholy soundtrack. In the end titles of the game you're presented with a listing of all the bosses you fought the entire time, and in an extremely unusual move, every boss has a listed crew count. There's no visible humans in the game at all, no cool protagonists babbling "Let's attack aggressively!" in lieu of a plot or fulfilling the local cute anime girl quota, no intro cutscene explaining the stakes, the only presence of humanity is their reduction to numbers in the end, a quiet procession of kill counts. More than anything that's what makes this feel like a depiction of heartless warfare to me, the casual mention of the fact that hundreds of people were manning the death-raining war machines that your two pilots had to shoot down and kill. It's pretty interesting.
Oh, speaking of two pilots. I think my favorite thing about Paladin was playing it with my brother. It's much easier as a two-player game for obvious reasons, a single player has to constantly switch modes to play the game (no twin stick capabilities on the Genesis!) which makes it way harder to handle all the ambushes it throws at you. But with two players you have the added element of communication, you actually have to talk to your partner to discuss threats and priorities. This is another aspect that feels powerfully simulationist, like an early 20th century warplane pilot having to get the help of their gunner. Bio-Ship Paladin is simultaneously a sterile space battle game where machines trade lasers with other machines without a human in sight, and a game defined entirely by the idea that to some degree, even if you can't see it, those mechanical behemoths are all about the people within them. Thousands die. That's life!
Also I like the thing where your ship gets larger and easier to hit as you get more health. Thanks for reading.
Horizontal shooter that changes things up by having you play as a larger and slower moving capital ship. You have a straight shot, a charged beam, and can collect satellite weapons that attached to the top and bottom of your ship (up to three on each side) but one of your main weapons to both do high damage and destroy enemy bullets if to hold a button to move a reticle around the screen which makes your ship stationary but firing at the target spot shoots an explosive shot that destroys bullets and does high damage to enemies and breakable terrain. Powerups include frequent health increases that also makes your ship even large, but increases the effectiveness and decreases the charge time of your beam weapon, the other powerup turns on the auto fire mode of your aimed weapon so it can destroy enemies and defend you while you move and fire the main guns. The satellite weapons can be destroyed when hit but more frequently appear and they further protect you from damage.
It's an interesting way to make a shooter but never comes together well as the main enemies just aren't interesting, bosses can destroy you easily unless you know what you are doing ahead of time (losing your three lives will allow you to use a credit to continue but it resets the stage), aiming the reticle can be a bit too awkward, there are some moments where you are trying to maneuver in cramped areas that feel at odds with the design of the game and they seemed to know that because of the placement of health pickups that seem to rely on you having crashed. The music and stage design is also nothing special. Probably would work better if the second player manned the guns and more enemies were added in that mode but the second player just controls their own ship.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1597133311931187200
It's an interesting way to make a shooter but never comes together well as the main enemies just aren't interesting, bosses can destroy you easily unless you know what you are doing ahead of time (losing your three lives will allow you to use a credit to continue but it resets the stage), aiming the reticle can be a bit too awkward, there are some moments where you are trying to maneuver in cramped areas that feel at odds with the design of the game and they seemed to know that because of the placement of health pickups that seem to rely on you having crashed. The music and stage design is also nothing special. Probably would work better if the second player manned the guns and more enemies were added in that mode but the second player just controls their own ship.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1597133311931187200
I can't remember, off the top of my head, an uglier gaming experience in every sense of the word.
This game looked ugly, controlled ugly and played ugly. I detested this game with everything I have.
Hate isn't the opposite of love, Bio-Ship Paladin is.
This game looked ugly, controlled ugly and played ugly. I detested this game with everything I have.
Hate isn't the opposite of love, Bio-Ship Paladin is.