Major Stryker
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Just wondering if anybody else has played Major Stryker? It’s an interesting game to compare to Raptor, being just a year older and made by the same company.
In a lot of ways it’s more traditional than Raptor – there’s no health bars, and it’s (essentially) one hit kills. The upgrade system is also a lot more like arcade shmups – it’s totally pickup-based and you lose everything when you get hit. That’s probably why I couldn’t beat even the first level on easy! (I’m not very good at shmups…)
But just something about how the levels are layed out, the attack patterns of the enemies, the ground-based targets and a few other subtleties are very reminiscent of Raptor.
It was a bit of a surprise then when I saw the two games were made by completely different teams (albeit both within Apogee). I’m sure Raptor’s team must have borrowed some things from the earlier game.
I played this for the first time just now.
There’s a standard arcade learning curve on the game, figure out what works, where enemies come from, and then you learn that you can mash alt to shoot faster and the first level was a breeze. The second level seemed much more difficult, might go back to that one later.
I just played Stargunner for a bit… also an interesting one to contrast with Raptor. Again an Apogee game (this time coming a bit later), and also with interesting similarities and differences.
The energy of this one is a lot more in line with traditional shmups – the power ups, types of enemies and their attack patterns etc. It’s also side-scrolling which is always fun to see.
But… it has a store, persistent power-ups and health bars, which is a lot more like Raptor again.
I played the shareware version back in the day and I remember it as a decent shooter. Movements are not as smooth as other titles, but it manages to pull out some impressive visuals with parallax scrolling that can also change speed. What I remember most is the presentation synced with the adlib music.
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