About a month ago, I beat the original Strider, so I figured it would be appropriate to move on to the Strider game that was meant to be its successor. No, not Strider 2…

This game is a platformer similar to the original Strider: you attack with a giant sword, have three hits until you die (five hits if you’re lucky enough to find health without getting hit), have a fixed jump height, and have a large player sprite. Controls are similar, but with a few key differences: 1) you can guide yourself when jumping straight up or falling straight down. This fixes one of the biggest issues I had with the original game, and it’s one of the only compliments I can give this one. 2) You can use a projectile attack after collecting ammunition, but it’s rarely useful since you can’t use them while moving (including while jumping), so you’ll end up forgetting about them most of the time. 3) Movement in the game is much more stiff overall. In the original game, forward jumps were a smooth arc, but in this one, forward jumps have you move up and forward in a line, then you stop briefly at the apex before moving down and forward in a line. Falling off of platforms also has you abruptly go down at max speed, unlike most other platformers (and real life) where you gradually but briefly build up to falling at max speed just after walking off a platform. Similarly, climbing on top of a platform from below is represented by the player sprite just sliding up while cycling through the flipping-animation frames (unlike the original where the flipping frames would appear in places that would realistically represent a person flipping onto the platform from below). Because it just has the protagonist slide upward, its possible that, if you were clinging to the bottom of a platform moving left/right, you’ll end up above air after you finish climbing and fall back down. These may seem like minor complaints, but it helps show just how little effort was put into this game (also, the Genesis port of the original Strider didn’t have these issues, so it isn’t a hardware limitation thing).

By the way, unlike the original Strider, using a continue will put you back at the last checkpoint rather than send you back to the beginning of the level. However, this game doesn’t have infinite continues; in the options, you can only set continues up to 5 (lives are fixed at 3), and if you lose all of them, you have to start the entire game over. Keep that in mind while reading the rest of my post.

When you start the game, you’ll notice that there was some effort put into a few of the game’s effects. The title of the game interlaces onto the screen, and when you start the first level, white sparkly things will come in from all sides of the screen to form the protagonist’s outline before he appears. The sword also has a much smoother animation, but you can turn it back to the original in the options. The next thing you’ll notice is that the small cluster of green pixels you thought was grass in the background was actually a landmine that will blow up and damage you if you touch it.

However, that is but a taste of the unfair design decisions that this game has. You see, the majority of enemies don’t have fixed locations in the stage, but instead will randomly spawn off-screen while you’re walking and charge at you, giving you hardly any time to react to them. Sometimes, one part of a level will be an empty hall, which is obviously boring; other times, that same hall will have two enemies that charge at you, a drone that tries to flank you, and a missile that comes in from the top of the screen while you’re trying to climb up, which is just unfair. To make matters worse, they’ll sometimes shoot at you just below your range, so even if you can react quick enough to kill them (or figure out the tactic of “spam the sword attack while walking”), you’ll still end up taking damage.

This happens all throughout the game, so keep it in mind, too. Honestly, just this combined with the lack of infinite continues kills any enjoyment for me, yet there’s more.

Anyway, back to the first level: it starts in a forest, and you’ll have to climb tree branches to infiltrate a base. Sometimes, a branch will break and you’ll fall back to the ground, but that’s not as bad as when you jump to a branch only to find that there are (robot?) birds on it that will swoop down and attack you. When you get inside the base, you’ll come across towers that fire 5 projectiles in different arcs at once. These enemies also appear throughout the game (although their locations are fixed), and if you don’t take them down from a distance as soon as they appear onscreen, you’re almost guaranteed to take a hit.

The first mini-boss is at the end of a hallway, and it constantly shoots missiles at you. Not only do the missiles move fast and appear at random heights, but they take a few hits to be destroyed, so it’s nearly impossible to simply make it to the mini-boss without taking damage. The mini-boss itself isn’t too hard; as long as you keep mashing the attack button, you can even destroy the missiles it tries to shoot since they come out of the gun slower than they speed at you.

The second mini-boss of the level is a machine inside of a dome; the dome will open up and the robot will throw out a projectile that will arc and hit the ground, covering the ground in flames. Then, the dome will close and its pattern will restart (also, it’s invulnerable while the dome is closed). Once you know what’s going on, it isn’t too hard to avoid its attacks, but it takes a while to beat it since you have to wait not only for it to be vulnerable, but for the ground to be safe again. In fact, all the bosses in this game take much longer to beat than the bosses in the original Strider. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but when the game makes you wait for the boss to be vulnerable, that’s just boring. Plus, one of the main draws of the original Strider was its fast pace, so not only does this goes against what people liked about the first game, but it isn’t even good design in the first place.

Not long after the mini-boss are two vertical shafts in succession. However, there are enemies on the walls of the shafts, so you can’t just climb up it. Instead, you have to wait for the enemies to move into range of your sword so you can kill them (you can’t attack upward or downward), then you have to inch up so you don’t run into the next one, and then you repeat the process. The second vertical shaft is more of the same, except you’re going down, and you can’t skip it since there’s a bottomless pit at the bottom of the shaft and you need to be on the left wall to jump to the boss room. The boss of the level uses the sprite of the cyborg from the first game, but rather than a gun, it has a flamethrower. It’s pattern isn’t too difficult to figure out, but it has a tendency to land on top of the player, which can be unexpected as it usually lands in front of the player.

By the way, when you make it to a boss in this game, you get five orbs that surround you. And no, they don’t act as shields (at least, not in the traditional sense). The orbs will go away if they’re hit enough, but if you manage to get hit before all of your orbs are gone, it will just remove an orb instead. On one hand, this does mean that it’s technically possible to have more than five hits before you die. On the other, I almost didn’t notice this since the orbs get destroyed so quickly, and at first, I thought they could deal damage to the boss (they can’t) since they didn’t seem to provide any immediate protection.

Between levels, there are voiced cut-scenes, similar to the arcade version of Strider, and to this game’s credit, the audio quality of the samples is quite good for a cartridge game of the time (although the dialogue is usually just some variation of “you can never win!”). However, the protagonist is still depicted in blue even though he’s wearing white in this game:

Changing the color palette of that one graphic was too much for the devs to handle, apparently.

The second level has you going into stone buildings, and it introduces background orb things that will shoot purple electricity at set intervals (since they’re in the background, they can’t be destroyed). It’s usually not too hard to time it right to get past them, but if you get hit, you’ll usually get knocked back into another electric beam and get hurt again. This level also introduces ropes, and since they weren’t in the first Strider game, you might mistake them for background at first before realizing you can’t proceed otherwise. Plus, they can be finicky to get on. Also, sometimes, the ropes are positioned directly beside walls, and since the protagonist can climb walls naturally, it (among other things) makes me think that this was going to be something else, but was changed at the last minute when U.S. GOLD acquired the license to make a Strider game.

Also, this level introduces the drones I mentioned earlier, and they’re mostly black sprites against a black background:

Combine that with the fact that they spawn randomly and move erratically, and you can see another reason why I hate this game so much.

The mini-boss of this level is a tank that will shoot a straight shot and an arced shot simultaneously, and when it’s attacked, it will charge forward quickly before retreating back into its corner just as quickly (the distance it charges grows with the more damage it takes). This is almost impossible to beat with the sword since it’s impossible to predict where the arced shot will land and the mini-boss could just ram you anyway. The only way I could beat the boss without taking damage is to crouch in the corner opposite of the boss (so you avoid the straight shot), wait for the arced projectile to land, then throw one of the protagonist’s own projectiles (remember those?) before jumping and clinging to the ceiling to avoid the next possible arced shot.

The next segment of the level introduces what I call “box electricity.” It’s those same background orbs from earlier, except they form the vertices of a rectangle, and the pattern of the electricity starts at one side and circles around the perimeter. Again, by itself, they aren’t that hard to deal with, but if you consider them in conjunction with the randomly spawning enemies I told you to remember, you’ll realize that it won’t be an uncommon situation for an enemy to get in your way right when you need to jump to the ceiling/floor to avoid the electricity that’s about to appear on the floor/ceiling.

If you can make it to the boss of this level, you’ll see that it reuses the sprite of the final boss from the first game, but rather than fly around and spawn enemies, he’s content to stay perfectly still in the middle of the arena shooting projectiles at you every second like a glorified Rinka, letting the super-box-electricity kill you. Yes, in a one-time deviation from their normal pattern, the box electricity will now summon all of its electricity at once per cycle, unless you can defeat the black orb in its center, which shuts off its electricity completely. However, when you defeat a black orb, it will make a bee-line toward the boss, and since the orbs are placed around the room in positions where you can’t exactly get around them, defeating one of the orbs may force you to take a hit. If you can shut off all the electricity in the room, it’s just a matter of getting close enough to the boss that you can actually deal damage, but good luck with that given the size of your hit-box compared to the frequency of his shots. Oh, and if you do somehow manage that, you won’t be able to hit him while standing on the platform or hanging from the ceiling (even though his sprite clearly extends to them); you can only hit him in midair, making it take even longer to beat him than necessary (remember that you also need to avoid his projectiles):

Also, don’t forget that jump height is fixed, so you can’t just do short-hops to attack him multiple times at once.

I tried for so long to get past this part normally, getting game over quite a few times, but after a while, I broke down and used save-states. I normally won’t use them since I consider it a form of cheating, but for this game, I feel it was justified.

Oh, and if you can defeat the boss, rather than explode like a good boss, it will shoot out the black orbs. And yes, they’ll hurt you if you get hit by one:

Just one more frustrating thing the game will do.

The third level is more vertically oriented, having you climb up girders. Also, the ropes are now chains, just in case you thought the game was starting to get too intuitive. But it’s only some chains that can be climbed; the other, slightly different styled chain graphics can’t be climbed:

Also, this level is more platform-oriented than the other levels, and this is where you really begin to notice that the game wasn’t really designed around the controls; it was designed against them. You see, there are many instances in this level alone where, if you perform a forward jump to jump over a gap, you’ll go so far past the gap that you’ll collide with an enemy on the next platform, and that doesn’t even include the ones that randomly may or may not spawn in those locations. If you want to try to avoid damage, you’ll have to back up, then jump from a decent distance away from the edge of the platform you’re on so that you land on the edge of the next platform instead of on the enemy. Plus, this level introduces hives: they’re black domes that open a door when you get close and release a swarm of bugs. The small ones release a lot of bugs, but they can all be destroyed if you’re quick enough. However, the large ones will spawn larger bugs that fly to the top of the screen and will swoop down to try to hit you. This may not sound that bad, but the bugs are attached to the screen, not the level. In other words, if you jump up to try to attack one, the level will scroll down and the bug will continue to be the same distance away from you as it was before you jumped.

If you can make it to the boss of this level, first of all, congratulations. Second, you’ll notice that it’s a giant robot bee that will fly back and forth while spawning more of those annoying large-size bugs and shooting rapid fire projectiles. Like with the other bosses, the simplest solution is often the wrong one: if you try to jump up and attack it with the sword, you’ll either get hit by one of the projectiles or, if you manage to time it to avoid the projectiles, one of the bugs will hit you. Also, keep in mind that, like the previous boss, you can’t attack it at the top of your jump:

What you actually need to do to avoid damage is walk below the boss. This will make it lower its tail, and you can attack this to damage the boss (you can even attack it while ducking, which means you can also avoid the bugs easily since they’re not programmed to fly below the top of your sprite most of the time).

The fourth level has you fighting through a non-linear alien den, and it’s surprisingly not as cheap as the rest of the game (except the water being harmful; that was unintuitive). I actually kinda had fun with this level, but that doesn’t nearly make up for the rest of the game. Even the boss, a robot dinosaur, is really easy to beat. In fact, it isn’t programmed to shoot its flamethrower anywhere but downward, meaning you can pretty much just cling to the ceiling and wail on it until it’s defeated (further adding evidence to my hypothesis that this was originally meant to be a different game):

The fifth and final level is a space ship where you have to re-fight all of the bosses and mini-bosses again while also going though the occasional stage bits. If you somehow didn’t realize that enemies spawn randomly before, this is where you’ll really notice it, since that’s pretty much the only level design this level has. However, this stage has one thing in it that isn’t in the rest of the game:

That’s right: the worst part of the first game makes a return appearance! If you’re familiar with the first game, but not this one, that image pretty much sums up what this game is in a nutshell: it’s Strider, but terrible.

To be fair, the version of that boss in this game is an improvement over the original: rather than launch you at the walls to damage you, it keeps you in its orbit while shooting orbiting projectiles at you, and you have a chance to destroy said projectiles before they reach you.

In the latter part of the stage, the electric orbs are reintroduced, but they tend to blend in with the background:

Also, the last boss you have to re-fight is the one that reuses the final boss’s sprite from the first game, which is thematically appropriate, I suppose. However, if you beat him, the whole level begins to shake, but it isn’t an escape sequence (there’s a time limit, but the game has a time limit for all the levels). There’s still the final boss of this game you have to deal with: the capsule containing the hostage you’ve been trying to save this whole time, and this is where the game reaches peak unfairness. You see, not only will the boss itself hurt you; not only does it move back and forth, making it harder to hit; not only does it fire black projectiles against the black background:

and not only does it do all of this while the screen is shaking, but attacking the boss will harm you if you attack it while the light at the bottom is orange. You can only damage the boss while the light is blue, and the game does nothing to make this intuitive. Plus, you might just be trying to attack one of the projectiles only to hit the boss as its coming back at you, and you get hurt simply because you didn’t see the boss coming and its light just so happened to be orange.

The end of the game depicts the protagonist carrying the hostage, then showing their ship escaping as the antagonist’s space ship explodes. Then, it says “The end” in front of a black screen, and it goes to the name entry screen (for the high score). Yup, not even a staff roll; I’m guessing the devs knew this was a bad game and didn’t want their names associated with it.

In conclusion, this has to be one of the worst games I’ve ever beaten. Even Zook Hero 2 wasn’t as unfair as this, and that was a freaking bootleg game! Don’t play this game. Don’t even emulate it; it isn’t worth your time.