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.