Solar Striker

Developer: Nintendo R&D1
Publisher: Nintendo
Release: 1990
Platform: Game Boy
Genre: Shoot 'em-up

Solar Striker could easily be—as it was at the time—dismissed as just an average, anachronistic vertical shooter. But producer—and creator of the very Game Boy hardware—Gunpei Yokoi had much more in store for the title: alongside the game itself Yokoi laid guidelines for his peers on how to properly develop for the new hardware. Unfortunately his message never quite reached the audience it was intended for and the platform suffered with the console being downright misunderstood in its early years.

Developing for the Game Boy brought up two complementary (or “detrimentary”) issues that were first ignored altogether and then struggled with by old-timers from the industry: graphics and gameplay.

It was the classic form/content conundrum art always have faced, but worse: technically one stood in the way of the other here.

Of course, the initial problem was the 4-shades-of-grey/green color palette limitation; but that gets even darker (no pun intended) under the small dot matrix display’s resolution.  Initially titles suffered from the “flea syndrome” resulted from the straight-forward big screen modus operandi being crammed into the system; afterwards slowdown became more frequent as bigger sprites were hard to handle.

Evolution from first to second installments of Super Mario Land and Batman

Yokoi solved both problems with Solar Striker. First, by making a sharp distinction between the actual playfield and the background through the use of good contrast and clear tiles, both together helping the sprites to pop-out naturally; and most importantly, allowing the game to manage big sprites without hampering the action speed by NOT showing the entire playable area at once. Despite being a vertical shooter Solar Striker has some spare screen on the sides where you can go as the “camera” follows smoothly, and without the need to “render” the entire scene it has got some extra flops to burn with the action.

Solar Striker next to contemporary shooters: Galaga, Nemesis and Sagaia.

Still, there’s more to it. People back then—and even nowadays—regard Solar Striker as cheap due to its lack of continues. The game per se is not that hard, but getting to its end within some 3-misses limit could be challenging indeed. But that perception falls apart when you realize the intricate risk/reward system behind the so-called artificial toughness. You can earn extra lives at a decent pace by scoring high; but doing so demands a more aggressive stance on tackling enemies’ formations. So, the way to go here is not to simply avoid losing lives altogether; is to raise the risk bar when in need of the very same lives.

Solar Striker remains one of the best shooters to ever grace Game Boy, aside being a living lecture on game design.