Soulstar
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| Soulstar | |
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| Developer(s) | Core Design |
| Publisher(s) | Core Design |
| Release date(s) | 1994 |
| Genre(s) | Scrolling shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player and Two player |
| Platform(s) | Mega CD / Sega CD Atari Jaguar CD (unreleased) |
| Media | CD-ROM |
Soulstar is a pseudo 3D space shooter in a similar vein to Nintendo's Star Fox, released in 1994.
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[edit] Overview
The game is a scrolling shooter viewed from a behind-the-ship 3D perspective incorporating a Mode 7 style graphical effect. Soulstar was amongst a handful of games developed by Core Design using this graphical style among Battlecorps, BC Racers and Thunderhawk AH-73. The game also features a CD quality orchestral soundtrack.
[edit] Description and Gameplay
Gameplay is based around three vehicle types, that the player space combat vehicle transforms into. The first mode is an on rails scrolling shooter, similar to the Star Fox and Space Harrier. This mode involves flying a Strike Craft through space towards huge scaling sprites of a planet or space station and flying across a texture mapped planetscape. The second mode involves controlling a hovering Turbo Copter in 360 degrees of freedom, allowing the player to move freely across the map. The third mode uses a similar 360 degrees mode, but this time the player controls a Mech Strike Walker.
[edit] Selectable Game Routes
At the player enters the space station at the end of the first level, there are three warp gates to chose from. Each warp gate determines the difficulty of the game (from easy to hard), of which each have a set of levels. At the end of each level set, the player returns to the space station to choose a remaining warp gate.
[edit] Unreleased Ports
An unfinished outsourced port of the game also exists for the Atari Jaguar CD. There are some poor quality screenshots of the game available on the web:[1], but other than that very little information concerning this game port exists. Judging by the appearance of these screenshots, the game runs at a higher screen resolution than the Sega CD version and has better texturing. A copy of this game can be seen running at the Jaguar Connexion 2005 [2].
A short video comparing both Sega CD and Atari Jaguar CD versions can be seen here:[3].
There are signs that a version of the game for the Sega 32X, called Soulstar X, was once in development. [1]
I can confirm that Soulstar was in development for the 32X because I was the programmer writing it. It couldn't make use of a CD drive so the music was all Megadrive, but the SFX did use the new sound hardware. Graphically it used 256 colours, and used both SH2s to re-scale and draw all the sprites.
The project had to be abandoned due to the Jaguar-CD version (which I also wrote) needing more time, mainly due to problems getting the Jaguar-CD to reliably load data from the CD. The Jaguar-CD version was actually completed, but was never released.
[edit] Refernces
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