#7 SUPER THUNDER BLADE

Never judge a game by its clam shell. This is some deceptively cool looking box art. 

 The depressing black and white mess of a title screen is a much better depiction of what you are about to experince. 

If this continues much longer you’re going to start to wonder why I claimed I love the Genesis so much. I promise you though it gets better and we are almost out of the woods. This is, thank God, our last launch title. Wikipedia if you change the lineup one more time I swear to God I will kill you and your whole family, which I imagine includes about.com. It feels like I am earning the right to play games I actually enjoy, especially as many of my favorites and games I’ve always wanted to try come later in the Genesis life span. The further down the line we go the more games I like will pop up. But I have suffered plenty and the next few games we review are going to be good ones – or at least I am going to try my very best to pick them that way.

But right now we have no choice but to look at one of my most hated games of all time. You don’t even need to read further, I wouldn’t blame you. Super Thunder Blade is absolute dismal crap. This is the most annoying gnat that ever had the audacity to call itself a game I have ever played. I know what you’re thinking. It looks like Space Harrier. Space Harrier is best game of the century compared to this abomination.

Everything I said was wrong with space harrier is increased about two-hundred fold. The lack of animation frames that make bullets and obstacles impossible to dodge, the repetitive flying in a circle, it’s all here and then some. You now also get really bad controls likely meant to guise as realism, the worst level designs I’ve ever seen, and a broken version of a vertical shmup mixed in.

Helicopters are a big effing deal in the 90s. I’m not totally sure why this is but we definitely had a love affair with them. You’ve never seen to many helicopter games as you will see in the 16-bit era. I certainly haven’t seen any sense. When was the last time a helicopter themed game was even released on a console? This generation? I don’t think so. If it was it sure as hell was not popular. But we got tons of them on the Genesis and Super Nintendo and a lot of them were actually really good! I can think of four off the top of my head right now that were great fun. But this game is truly unplayable.

Just fly in circles, shoot, and pray. Thats it. Fifty bucks please. 

Like Space Harrier Super Thunder Blade is a rail shooter and the two games appear to be running on the same engine. Super Thunder Blade just has dismal controls, stupid features, and terrible level design. The controls feel delayed; every move you make is slow and clumsy. I think what they wanted to do is make it feel like what they imagined flying a real helicopter was like. This would be fine in other games but this isn’t a realistic game! You’re shooting down F-14’s and giant sci-fi battle tanks the size of sky scrapers! There isn’t anything realistic about it so this doesn’t add to the suspension of disbelief it’s just annoying.

Space Harrier had tight controls and even it got annoying when it came to obstacles because of the frame rate. Well, the frame rate is now just as bad if not worse only the controls are also terrible and the obstacles take up much larger portions of the screen.

There is no strategy to the shooting what so ever. When you fire, every few machine gun blasts also shoots off a homing missile. As long as you don’t get shot yourself things in front of you will always be shot down, there is no reason at all to line up your shots.

You'd better get used to seeing this image because you'll be looking at the broken fragments of your chopper a lot. 

The result of all this is a game where it feels like your spinal cord has been severed from your brain. You don’t actually feel like you are playing anything. Whatever happens on the screen, be it a victory or a defeat, does not seem to have any real solid connection to what you are doing with the controller.

And then there are the vertical levels. My God. Half way through each stage it turns into a vertical shooter. Only get this – you can only move from side to side. The chopper stays fixed to the bottom of the screen. It is also supposed to be hitting ground targets and they wanted it to look like the nose of the chopper is pointing diagonally towards the ground. What this actually translates to is a shooter where you cannot move up and down the scrolling screen and your shot only goes out about the length of your ship’s body. How could they have made so many bad decisions? There is no excuse for this! It’s not even technical limitations at play in these levels, the designers actually consciously choose these decisions and thought they were good ideas!

I sincerely want to know what made them think this was a fun addition. 

This super scaler stuff (the tech behind games like space harrier and thunder blade) does not seem to be fairing very well on this console so far. The whole time I was forcing my way through this mess I kept thinking of the poor Japanese, whose only launch titles were this and Space Harrier II. No Altered Beast. No Thunder Force. Can you imagine? Abysmal Crap and slightly less annoying crap. No wonder the Mega Drive would never do as well there as here; it had its poor legs broken right from the start.

Well it’s over. We’ve finally made it out of the launch titles which mean I now have a lot more choices about what to play next. It wasn’t the greatest launch and even the good games were a pale shadow compared to what was to come. Altered Beast remains my favorite of the bunch but it gets better. Much better. We now move into the rest of 1989. The weeks and months following launch day would see the Genesis start to establish a more solid and diverse library of games. It’s going to be an exciting time and the journey is only just beginning! The launch titles are merely the threshold out the door into the world of Sega Ages!