Solar Striker is a game that not even Nintendo wants to remember too much, a skeleton in the closet I guess you could call it. When the Game Boy released someone there went "shit, we need an STG for the masochism crowd" and threw Gunpei Yokoi and his team at it to quickly develop one for their brand new portable.

Solar Striker is about as humble and modest as one can get with a vertical shmup on such an unassuming system, but despite this it still managed to draw me in with it's simplicity. I always can't be helped but be charmed by games that have very little to work with, but manage to still be entertaining. Solar Striker has no bombs, no chargeable beam weapons, no homing missiles, no Moai, no nothing. No bullshit, just your gun and some limited upgrades to ward off the enemies.

It's obviously not all gumdrops and rainbows, the game has it's fair share of annoyances such as the enemies who begin appearing in stage 5(?) who speed across the screen from top to bottom in an attempt to crash into your ship like a suicidal sunday driver. The bosses also range from moderately difficult to just plain psychotic, look at this guy! Why was he not the final boss? He's insane!

It's interesting to note that when I booted this up on my emulator on my DS it defaulted to the "Space Invaders" pallete, which made the background black and the sprite outlines white, giving it the appearance of playing the game at "night mode". It was weird, but I played it like that anyway. I thought it was neat. No idea if it's like that elsewhere.

It's funny to think that Solar Striker representation might have less of a chance than Goku at appearing in Smash Bros, even X managed to get a nice music remix at least.