Stellar Assault for the Sega Saturn!

[greg]

originally a 32X game, and a real good one, too. I've only played the first few missions, and although your ship's shields are a bit too overpowered and your wingmen are a bit more worthless at destroying enemies than is typical of such games, it is pretty darn fun. Your ship has lock-on lasers, similar to Layer Section, aside from your guns. These are very cool, but they seem to have unlimited ammo and make the game a bit easy. I should try this game on a more difficult setting.

I bought this game in Akihabara yesterday morning at Super Potato for a fairly decent price (no spine card). Has anyone played this, or its 32X version?

[Pretas]

I have the US 32X version (Shadow Squadron). You don't get any wingmen there. It feels like almost a completely different game depending on which ship you select. The sense of scale is very impressive for a game of its time.

[null1024]

I've played the 32X version a bunch. Decent bit of fun. Tend to brickwall on the third or 4th stage.

[Zeether]

I think the homing lasers do have limited ammo, the "Energy" bar on the HUD decreases when you use them. Also the red ship (the Feather I think it's called) doesn't seem to have them, it's just this laser splash (which is mostly useful for larger craft in conjunction with your normal laser)

[Ji-L87]

Haven't played it myself, but the music tracks I've heard are ace.

[BrianC]

How different is this from the 32X version? Does it have a lot of new content?

[The Coop]

How different is this from the 32X version? Does it have a lot of new content?

Yes. It has missions extremely similar to the 32X game, and then a bunch more that include shooting down big missiles over an ocean, descending into an atmosphere, flying into and out of a planet, and a host of others. There's also a lot of story chatter between missions, which you can thankfully turn off in the options (some of it goes on for way too long).

[greg]

I can't figure out how to resume the game where I'd left off. Does the game expect me to play through every mission in one sitting? I save the game, but when I load it, it just starts at mission 1. There's something called "trace game," but I'm not sure what it's about. I'm too lazy to try to sit down with the manual and translate it, and there's no thorough FAQ of the game, other than a brief walkthrough of the missions.

[Zeether]

Trace is a fancy work for a replay, it just shows a replay of the mission as you played it (it "traces" your gameplay). Would suck though if it actually makes you play on one sitting though...

[The Coop]

Yeah, "Trace" is just a replay option so you can watch your performance during the level you just played. You can't save during the game at any point as far as I can tell.

If you turn off all of the chatter stuff, it takes about 2 hours to get through the game. Not as bad as it could be, but a bit long for a single sitting.

[greg]

Oh gosh... That is a bit discouraging. Every other mission-based flight games I know of have a save game feature. I'll have to look into turning off the chatter. Thanks for the info.