Remembering: Gunstar Heroes

Gunstar Heroes is amongst the most highly-regarded games of the 16 bit era. Easily a top ten contender on the Genesis/Mega Drive platform, and undoubtedly a must-play for the retrogaming scene. This is mainly due to its creators, the somewhat legendary programming team Treasure, whom broke off from Konami to make some serious games. Games that arguably helped sell a console, or would be discovered as genre classics later on. And the odds are, you've ready played it. Sega published the title and has made it a regular feature of its retro Compilations. The merit of Gunstar Heroes as a run and gun shooter is unassailable at this point, but I want to talk about why I found it awesome. 

 

The game boots up with immediate cutscenes. What's the plot? That's complicated as somebody rewrote it for English speakers, and it's presented in media res, which is a bit high brow for a game mainly about blowing shit up. You get the impression that some bad stuff is going down, only for THAT title screen to hit like a comet, and if you wait a bit you get more exposition, but you're probably none the wiser. Basically, everyone is named after a colour, and bad guys want gems to repair some kind of doomsday robot, so stop them. Cool. So, you press start, choose your control scheme, your starting gun, and 1 of 4 levels, while two characters natter flavour text and tips. You go for the leftmost level, and immediately you have to stop robots from destroying a jungle village. Then you fight a killer plant. Then you climb a pyramid. Then you fight a boss made of boxes. Then you slide down the pyramid. Then you fight a construction robot boss, with a dramatic end of level announcement. Then there's a comedy cutscene where its crew fly off, Team Rocket Style, and your character strikes a pose. Then you're back at the level select screen. Phew.

All the above happens in under 7 minutes. By 16 bit standards, you have what amounts to an entire games worth of action set-pieces, and several games worth of "narrative" in what is the first and least impressive level, plus skippable text. It only gets better from there. This is awesome.

Gunstar Heroes is a game that is at once an easily assessable spectacular, and a mechanically nuanced system for experts. Unlike a majority of its genre, it actually provides numerical health meters for characters and bosses, thus avoiding one-hit kills. This should make the game easier, but it doesn't feel easier. Rather it means that mistakes are yours, and the game is kicking your arse fair and square. Play is more a matter of learning and skill, finding what works for you, rather than rote memorisation and twitch reflexes. You get a huge amount of freedom, from your characters firing stance, the starting weapon, the way weapons combine, and a surprisingly complex melee system. Body-slams, sliding kicks, throws, and an easily missed block, are there if you need them. The game won't punish you for experimenting, but also takes terms like "hard mode" very seriously. It's not cheap, in other words, and the creators clearly wanted you to play this repeatedly because you want to, not because it's so difficult to complete you couldn't do it in a weekend rental. R-Type, I'm looking in your general direction. Everybody can enjoy this, and it's two player co-op, where you can throw your mate as an improvised weapon. 

As a final note: while it does not shine by modern standards, Gunstar Heroes was a significant technical achievement for its day. This is best represented by sprite-scaling masterpiece that was Seven Force, possibly the single greatest boss fight of the 90's. This 7 form monster was almost unreal by Mega Drive standards, and it's obvious how proud they were with it. It's in level 2, where everybody could see it.

Go play Gunstar Heroes, you muppet.