It's new to me: Solar Assault

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gradius did not contain itself to a single genre. It started out as — and is most famous for — its horizontal-scrolling shoot ‘em ups, but sticking to a more traditional shooting game format wasn’t a requirement for the series. Cosmic Wars released for the Famicom in 1989, just four years after the first Gradius title, and it was a proto-4X game that had more in common with Military Madness than any STG. Compared to that deviation, making the move to join the growing number of 3D rail shooters was practically no change at all for Konami’s shoot ‘em up.

On-rails shooters were having a moment in the 90s, thanks to the growing power of 3D technology, with that movement kicking off in the arcades. Namco was responsible for a significant amount of this: in 1990, they released Galaxian3, which was rendered in full, true polygons, for Expo ‘90 in Japan. It had its own building: it was a 28-seat theater with a hydraulic arcade machine, designed in a way so that none of Namco’s rivals could copy what they were doing. Which none of them did, naturally, until Namco decided to scale things down and make that process a bit easier. Galaxian3 also created a smaller 16-player version, and then finally a six-player theater that’s still impossibly large, but could at least fit in a traditional arcade space.

Galaxian3 changed the game up in a number of ways: not only was it from a first-person perspective and in genuine 3D, but rather than taking one hit and having your ship explode, you instead had a health bar. A shared one, if you were playing multiplayer, but a health bar nonetheless. This allowed Namco to significantly ramp up the difficulty, as well, since you could take quite a few hits before a game over — the game became about defeating as many enemies as possible while taking as little damage as possible, for as long as you could manage. Rather than an endless loop of stages, as was Galaxian’s style in its first decade-plus of existence, there was a fixed number of stages here, with some branching paths.

While Galaxian3 was both important and influential, it was one of the branches on its family tree that ended up driving the direction of the industry for a bit. Starblade was built off of a prototype for a single-player version of Galaxian3, and released in arcades in that format. Though the prototype didn’t test well, hence it becoming something else entirly, the revamped version of it that ended up being Starblade was a significant success, with Namco selling every cabinet they produced per a Retro Gamer retrospective, and it coming in as the top-grossing upright arcade cabinet in October and November of 1991 after its September release, then sticking in the top 10 until mid-February of 1992 — it would remain in at least the top 14 through the rest of ‘92, and sneak one last top-20 ranking in for January of 1993, at number 17.

3D on-rails shooters had a genuine hit, and that meant we’d be seeing more and more of them. Starblade directly inspired the direction of Star Fox — Argonaut Software had already been working on the original game in Nintendo’s new series, basing it off of their experience with their own Starglider, but they wanted to “re-create the experience” of the popular game on a home console, per Dylan Cuthbert, and “seeing what they achieved inspired us to push even more.” Sega’s Panzer Dragoon took a cue from Starblade, as well: the key developer behind that game, Yukio Futatsugi, singled out Starblade as the shooter that stood out the most to him, per a Kotaku retrospective. “He loved its ‘cinematic presentation’ and ‘Star Wars-like story,’ which inspired him to make Panzer Dragoon similarly focused on characters, storylines, and a movie-like feel. At the time, these things were uncommon in the shooter genre.”

These weren’t the first rail shooters ever, but they were among the first to be in actual 3D — Space Harrier, Galaxy Force and their ilk were faux-3D, powered by Sega’s Super Scaler technology rather than the real thing Namco was utilizing by the time of Galaxian3 — and with the switch from a 2D-centric to 3D-centric, polygonal mid-to-late-90s environment, both in the arcades and in the living room, there were more and more of these kinds of games all the time. Konami would eventually get in on the action with Gradius in 1997, in a game named like the spin-off it was: Solar Assault. This, like Starblade, was an arcade title, and one more impressive visually than what the Nintendo 64 or Sega Saturn or Playstation were capable of — remember that the tech powering the Playstation, as advanced as it was when the system released in Japan in 1994, was static in comparison to the ever-changing arcade space, which was now a year away from Sega’s NAOMI board that was similar to their Saturn successor, the Dreamcast.

Solar Assault is tough. One thing that made Gradius difficult is that it was claustrophobic and full of enemies and bullets to dodge in addition to walls, and that the Vic Viper was defenseless unless you had picked up the temporary shield upgrade. Take a hit, explode, start over from a checkpoint without any of your fancy power-ups. Solar Assault decided to keep things that way, despite the switch from a horizontal STG to rail shooter, the latter of which, following the example of Galaxian3, included a health bar or significant shielding before your craft exploded or your dragon died. No, in Solar Assault, you take one hit and you die. There is a shield power-up, yes, but it takes far less of a beating before it’s gone than Gradius’ more traditional defense mechanism, which you see shrinking in size with each potential death it saves you from until it’s finally gone.

Whether all of that is a positive or not depends a lot on your patience for that sort of thing. Playing Solar Assault is difficult in the present, since you can emulate it via MAME, but it’s a glitchy experience that might also require some finagling before you can even get it running. Solar Assault is one of those games that has “Known Problems,” to use the MAME library’s language, and that doesn’t even get into how Solar Assault utilized an analog stick with a trigger, not a joystick, which is much more difficult to replicate the movement and actions of on a keyboard. Oh, and it would also freeze up in stage four basically like clockwork until a couple of years ago when playing through MAME, which was discouraging. If you can get it running now, though, it is fully playable all the way through.

Even not on MAME, though, as Hardcore Gaming 101 tells it, there are issues: the controls are imprecise, and the lack of crosshairs can make aiming shots difficult. It doesn’t help, either, that the North American edition of the game is actually Solar Assault Revised, which, while introducing new stages and various fixes powered by a brand new arcade board, also made parts of the existing game more difficult. Which was probably not necessary, but hey, Gradius taking its foot off the gas wouldn’t be very Gradius-like.

You can choose to play as the Vic Viper, of course, as well as the Lord British, which had been around for quite some time in the series at this point, as it first debuted in a different spin-off, Salamander. Then there was the new ship, the Alpinia, which looks like a cross between the two only with black and orange coloring. The three ships have their own initial loadouts, which by this point was also a Gradius standard. You’re still using the collectable orbs to power up your weaponry as you see fit, using the upgrade system inspired by role-playing games introduced in the original Gradius that made it stand out so much from other shooters on the market. It is truly Gradius, but from a different perspective.

You’ll see familiar enemies and enemy designs, now only in 3D — you won’t be surprised to find that there are cores that need shooting. In this way Konami is pulling the same trick that Namco had in the past — not with the original Starblade, no, but with Xevious’ transition to 3D in Solvalou, which pulled the 2D-to-3D thing all the way back in 1991, on the same System 21 arcade hardware that powered Starblade. That’s not surprising at all, really: the only surprise is that more developers didn’t attempt the same trick, but then again, with so much 3D development shifting to home consoles, and the rise of the fighting game coming to arcades, maybe only the heaviest hitters making these kinds of switches actually makes the most sense.

There are just five stages in the original Japanese release of Solar Assault, with the Revised edition adding the “Fierce Blaze” volcano level to give the game six, instead. It can be defeated in short order, as far as pure time from start to finish goes — under 25 minutes is a little short even for a shoot ‘em up. However, recall the discussion about the game’s difficulty: it’s going to take a whole lot of playtime to get to the point where you can plow through Solar Assault in under 30 minutes, unless you were just feeding the thing quarters. And it would take quite a few of them, too: Solar Assault required three quarters to start, and two more to continue. Inflation takes some of the romance out of the idea of just popping another quarter in to give things another go.

Solar Assault looks great, but was very much meant for the arcade experience rather than an at-home one. Which never ended up existing, either, unlike Starblade, which was ported to the Sega CD and Playstation: not as a solo release, and not as part of any kind of compilation. Maybe with Hamster’s Arcade Archives adding the “Arcade Archives 2” format that includes Namco’s 32-bit Ridge Racer, however, an opportunity will present itself to finally bring it home. And given that those titles also tend to allow for some customization with difficulty, extends, and the like, it could end up being the most playable and enjoyable version released, as well, even if it’s missing some of the qualities that make playing something like this in an arcade on a cabinet special.

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