The shmup party continues

After the pleasant experience I had with Strikers 1945, I couldn't help but play its sequel, appropriately called Strikers 1945 II, and it basically turned out to deliver everything I expected from it. Heck, what can you ask of a shmup sequel? New levels, ships (or planes, in this case), enemies and maybe a couple of graphical improvements. Strikers 1945 II has it all. And that's about it... Unfortunately it still has a blatant lack of game modes or other extras to keep you entertained, but at least this time around the bonus art gallery is extended to not only our planes but the enemy ships too. To make things simple, if you liked the first one, you got to play the sequel.



Now, moving away from the 2nd World War, there's another Psikyo game for the Saturn that I was curious to try out, specially after playing its rather great sequel on the Dreamcast, thanks to Uncle Tom's recommendation. I'm talking about Gunbird, this rather eccentric shooter where you control a cast of very odd characters in a struggle to fight...uhh...an evil corporation? Space pirates? I don't know...who cares about the story in a shooter, anyway?

To make a long story short, it's a Psikyo shooter. I'm quickly learning that these guys rarely reinvent the wheel, and if you've played one of their games, you've basically played them all. This is not bad, though, since the change in theme is enough to make Gunbird a whole different experience from Strikers 1945, for example. Like in it's sequel, the little cut-scenes are always full of humour (or so I suppose, everything's in Japanese) and the scenarios are pretty detailed, with little people down there who're either running for their lives or completely oblivious to all the shit blowing up in the skies.



Like every other shooter I've played recently, this one also ends pretty quickly, but unlike most of them it has a lot of extras, like videos about the characters, videos about other things (don't know what exactly, it's just a character speaking in Japanese, Segata knows about what...) and a pretty extensive artwork gallery featuring more than 400(!) drawings.

Once again, if for a chance you've played Gunbird 2 on the Dreamcast (or any other platform, for that matter) and liked it, this is basically more of the same, hence being a worthy addiction to the Saturn's prolific shooter library.

Right now I'm about to try yet another shooter, so expect another post soon, maybe even later today (I have to make the most out of my temporary "Saturn fever").