Save your home planet, fighting mechanized enemies.
The enemy mechanized planet "Red Eye" Is approaching your galaxy's home planet. Flying in the starfighter "Geo Sword", it is your mission to execute Operation: Starblade, and save your home planet.
Three discrete missions. The first focused upon making your way through
the approaching enemy fleet and getting to the planet to begin with. The
second, rather harder, remined me of the assault upon the Death Star at
times...but with better firepower on the part of the ground emplacements.
After destroying the reactor and watching a nice movie, you entered the
third and final mission; making your way back towards Earth, through the
rather-annoyed fleet from Redeye....the final enemy was, of course, the
mothership that had escaped before Redeye's reactor blew. After defeating
that, you were treated to a exhilirating (At least to me, my adrenaline
was still treating my heart like a jackhammer after spending a dollar or
two in the process of saving Earth) view of your fighter joining formation
with two other ships and flying past the camera, doing a slow roll...then
given views of a few passing capital ships as the credits rolled.
There were a few interesting features to this game. It was an enclosed
booth with a large curved projection screen in front of the bench. This
had the effect of making the game text nearly impossible to read, except
for such items as the logo and the high scoring, and of course the title
screen. Control was by means of a large anchored gun turret of the sort
one might expect to see in a water park...moving it around the screen
triggered crosshair motion as well. Two firing buttons existed, one on
each handle of the gun. Although it was a rail-shooter and exhibited
notable polygon fadein, not to mention opaque sprite explosions when the
player was hit, two speakers behind the contoured chair and
nicely-utilized strobe lights concealed to the side of the screen provided
wonderful feedback. Another interesting aspect was that you actually
COULD shoot the big ships that looked like scenery...although hard to
notice in the near-constant firefight, anything that had a color-cycling
rectangle was shootable for a good deal of bonus points. Apparently, the
actual geometry data for the game was loaded "on the fly" from a laserdisc mounted under the player's seat.
There is a PSX version, named Starblade Alpha.