I'm big fan of Namco. I like Tekken. I like Ace Combat and I like Ridge Racer. And in July 2006 I had this to say about Starblade http://fz1-3do.blog.co.uk/2006/07/23/starblade~982287
It's fair to say, I like Starblade. I like it a lot. So, imagine my fanboy delight when I learnt that the kind-of sequel to Starblade, namely Galaxian 3, was released on my beloved Playstation.
Now, in 1995 there was a fair amount of jabbering about 'bringing the arcade home'. Which was all well and good, but imagine bringing Galaxian 3 home. It was $150,000, and it was 16 feet square by about 8 feet high. That's pretty big, and pretty expensive, so if Namco was going to bring this behemoth home, some corners were going to be cut.
I know at this stage you'd like me to say that it's arcade perfect and was uprated to take advantage of the Playstation hardware, and it's an absolute joy to behold. However, in your heart-of-hearts you know full well that this was a sloppy port. And it was.
The game was originally projected onto a 120 inch screen using twin projectors, so obviously, the home conversion made no effort to ratify this for the small screen, they simply glued the two images together so badly you can see the join.
The high-resolution graphics, essentially the back drop, which was done so nicely on the original Starblade seems to have been put through an N64 blur-filter in Galaxian 3 on the Playstation. Meaning that the polygon based enemy craft look artificial, they aren't part of the same universe as the backdrops.
The magic, the magic that was in the ports of Starblade is gone in Galaxian 3. And it's gutting.
Let's face it, Galaxian and for that matter Starblade, is actually about a 3D journey and a wonderfully pre-rendered space battle, the game, the actual playing element, was at best pretty weak . The graphics in Starblade, for what they were, made the game. The graphics in Galaxian 3 on the Playstation, broke the game.
For some inexplicable reason, Namco seemed to believe that the game play of Galaxian 3 was so good, it didn't need sharp graphics. Namco was wrong. It did need. It needed very much. Galaxian 3 on the Playstation is just a pre-rendered onrails shooter, with horrible blurry graphics.
Galaxian 3 is almost identical to Starblade too. The obviously borrowed the Galaxian moniker to add some credibility to the game when in reality Galaxian 3 is basically Starblade version 1.5. In fact Galaxian 3 is a multiplayer, slightly younger version of Starblade, with altered grander, but crappier looking pre-rendered graphics.
The game takes around 10 minutes to complete, and takes almost exactly the same route as Starblade. You start in deep Space, fly through some asteroids, attack some big spaceships, descend on to the planet, shoot the bit in the middle of the planet and you are done. It's so close to Starwars you can almost hear Obi Wan mumbling in you ear.
What I supposed happened was that the original Starblade, which also came out on the Playstation, had quite a bit of money spent on it by Namco. I don't imagine it sold too well and Galaxian 3 was shovelled across as cheaply as possible to either re-coup the money they lost doing a good job on the Starblade port, or it was done for contractual reasons.
Either way, Galaxian 3 on the Playstation upset me.
3DOKid
