Strikers 1945 was (and kinda still is) my go-to "this arcade is cool if they have this game" game when I was in high school.

I didn't have too much experience playing shmups thanks to my parents never letting me play the cool "blow up a bunch of dudes in a plane while flashy stuff happens on the screen" games when we went to bowling alleys. They let me play the occasional beat-em-up when I got a chance, but for some reason or another shmups were always verboten when I was little. By the time I got a little older and was given more autonomy, arcades in the US were very obviously dying out, but I would still find the occasional game cabinet in movie theaters and pizza places. My local movie theater specifically had Strikers 1945 and I would go out of my way to play it a decent number of times before or after seeing a movie. I was never any good at it, but dodging projectiles for a few minutes and seeing the flashy bullet effects and explosions always gave me enough of a dopamine bump to give it another try whenever I found another cabinet of it somewhere. It was my go-to shmup.

Now that I'm much older and have played way more video games, I think it's safe to say that Strikers 1945 is best left in my nostalgia.

The gist of giant ships and planes transforming into machine gun-wielding mechs is cool as hell, but almost every other aspect of the game is either weak or forgettable.

The sound design across the board is just flat-out bad.

It's still fun, and it will always hold a special place in my heart as the first bullet-hell/shmup I actively remembered the name of, but after playing it comfortably in my living room via emulator with infinite coins instead of in a noisy, cramped, dimly-lit corner of a movie theater, I think it's safe to say that Strikers 1945 is just alright.

Don't ever ask me to 1cc a shmup by the way.

Never ask me that.