Shoulder Blade OUTERSPACE is a sister version of Nobuaki Washio's Shoulder Blade OVERDRIVE. They share a lot of concepts but are quite different games. Especially OUTERSPACE requires only MSX1 with 16KB RAM.
OUTERSPACE received the Bronze award or 2nd prize of the Retro Hobby Game Contest held by BEEP, a famous vintage PC and game shop in Akihabara Japan. The latest physical release sub-titled Powered by Matra is the enhanced version of the contestant. You can enjoy both version via service menu launched by holding up-direction while boot.
The game is a simple shoot'em up. You control a target marker and shot enemies. The enemies often deploy missile curtains. Furthermore they always chase you up. Dive through them by double-tap action as similar as you did in Shoulder Blade OVERDRIVE.
It should be specially mentioned that the behavior of your robot and the view-point. When you move the target marker to the right, the robot looks moving to the left. However in fact, it little moves in the absolute gaming space, but your view-point shifts to the right for keeping your sight wide. As the result, any other objects also moves to the same direction. Pay attention: you can't escape from chasing missiles just even if you let the target marker go around the screen. This concept is a little hard to explain but I'm sure you feel anacatesthesia you have never experienced in your playing.
Technically, Nobuaki make use of a tiny trick on indicating sprites. You are a little surprised at seeing tricolor characters on MSX1 for sure. If your MSX has PAUSE key, just use it by trial. That will reveal the trick. In short, everything is just an sensory illusion!
Relevant links:
Matra shop
Matra will produce this video game cartridge only for a very limited batch.
The BEEP shop contest
Game video Trailer on YouTube
The sountrack can be listened in this video.
Comments (1)
By ren
Paragon (2027)
26-11-2019, 16:21