[img width=300 height=300]http://imgur.com/FA5DA.jpg[/img]
September's Together Retro title for the game club over at
http://www.racketboy.com was
Urban Strike. Now I had always heard of the Strike series, but I had never actually played any of the games. Nor was I even familiar with them beyond their titles. I had no idea
how they actually played at all. Because of this I decided to first spend a little time with the Genesis version first in order to get a proper feel for how the game should play so that I might compare it to the Game Boy port. And in truth, I'm glad I did. I feel like playing the 16-bit version really helped me pick up on the vast subtleties that made the Game Boy port so impressive.
If you haven't played
Urban Strike or one of the other games in the series, it's a little hard to explain. Basically you control a helicopter, and the game utilizes a semi-3D sort-of isometric view. Genre-wise I guess I'd call the game strategic action. Each level contains multiple missions that can be completed in any order that you wish. And strategy such as armor, fuel, and ammo-consumption all plays a big part in the game. However all of the action is real-time. It's interesting, and unique if not a bit on the sharp-side when it comes to the learning curve. However, once you put an hour or two into figuring out what exactly it is that you're supposed to be doing, it becomes apparent that the game is actually really great.
Once I felt like I understood the game itself (it took me nearly two weeks to beat the first level), I popped in the Game Boy port. Now remember, this game almost looked too good for a 16-bit game. So condensing it down to a Game Boy title was certainly ambitious. And although certain aspects definitely suffered (there's no music, and only minimal sound effects during actual gameplay; and of course the controls had to be modified to utilize only two action buttons. However it should be noted that although much of the graphics had to be a bit downgraded, much of the layouts, animations and missions are left very close to intact. It's actually extremely impressive to see these pseudo-3D scrolling effects on the Game Boy.
Below I've taken the liberty of doing some Genesis vs. Game Boy screen shot comparisons.
[img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/jSizql.jpg[/img] [img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/0jUem.gif[/img]
[img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/DFWxfl.jpg[/img] [img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/N0H8a.gif[/img]
[img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/WYkCpl.jpg[/img] [img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/WyVLD.gif[/img]
[img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/lsg0xl.jpg[/img] [img width=200 height=200]http://imgur.com/2E3HT.gif[/img]
