Game-related ramblings.

History Lessons: Star Cruiser

Other History Lessons posts can be found here. If you’re looking specifically for console games, those are here. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

I’m on another detour from my nominal timeline for this series. The farthest we’ve reached is January 1989, with Clash at Demonhead. But when searching for a translation patch for the game to follow it in the timeline, I found some interesting games translated by the same team at Nebulous Translations that I didn’t have in my list. So I’m going back to play a few. The first was Getsu Fuuma Den, released back in July 1987. Now we’re jumping to May 1988, when Arsys Software released Star Cruiser for Japanese home computer systems. That places it between Ys II and Lord of the Sword in my timeline. Given the focus on consoles for this series, however — and because it’s the version with the translation patch — I played the port for Sega’s Mega Drive console, which appeared on January 21, 1990, and was handled by Masaya Games.

Star Cruiser caught my eye because it’s described as an action role-playing game combined with a first-person shooter, and, well… first-person shooters didn’t exist yet in 1988. There were a few early games on mainframes in the 1970s and 1980s, and the 1980 arcade game Battlezone might qualify, but most consider the first “true” first-person shooter to be Wolfenstein 3D in 1992. Star Cruiser seemed to do a lot of the same things, four years earlier. It even got a console port several years before Wolfenstein 3D released, which is extra surprising because consoles generally didn’t have first-person shooter games, at least not until Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 in 1997. I was curious to see what Star Cruiser is like to play.

It’s even more impressive than I expected. Wolfenstein 3D — and most first-person shooters that would follow it, all the way until Quake in 1996 — featured 3D environments but used 2D sprites for its enemies. That eased up a bit on the processing power needed to run those 3D worlds. But Star Cruiser fully commits to 3D. Everything in it is constructed from 3D polygons, from buildings to pieces of scenery to enemies. Most of those enemies are some form of vehicle, and will explode into constituent polygons when destroyed. This is crazy. Sure, polygons are standard for 3D computer graphics today, but it’s likely that most players in 1988 would have never seen them before. Especially not on a console. The closest touchpoint might be StarFox, which featured 3D polygonal spaceships, but wouldn’t appear until 1993 on the Super Nintendo. Even then, StarFox is a rail shooter, allowing its enemies to move in pre-set patterns. Star Cruiser is a full-blown first-person shooter, where players will move, turn, strafe, and shoot their way through its fully explorable locations. This would have been mind-blowing on release.

And Star Cruiser takes things even further, with a space flight sim mode as well. While most of the action happens on the surface of planets or inside space stations, as the nameable protagonist drives his land tank (or, more rarely, explores on foot), players can also take off in their titular Star Cruiser and fly around in space. No longer constrained to a flat plane for movement, the Star Cruiser has a full six degrees of freedom, able to fly in any direction as players head towards different planets and get into the occasional scrap with an enemy ship. Besides the freeform flying, the Star Cruiser is similar to the land tank, with the same set of laser and missile weapons, but it feels so libarating to just fly around. Most of my time piloting the Star Cruiser was spent traveling to different planets or stations, and could be sped up via a warp system or energy-draining autopilot (which I mostly used just to get the correct heading, before switching it off), which might sound boring. But it adds so much atmosphere to the game. Especially since the game begins in our own solar system, so I got to fly to Ganymede and Venus (and more!) to visit their futuristic settlements.

All of this ambitious design comes at a cost, however. I don’t know how Star Cruiser performed on its original home computer systems, but the Mega Drive version frequently dropped to single-digit frame rates when there were several objects on the screen. That meant my controller inputs often didn’t register, which could be especially frustrating during larger, more difficult battles late in the game. But these slowdowns didn’t bother me as much as I thought they would. Movement and combat in Star Cruiser feels tactical rather than frantic, in keeping with the theme of vehicular combat. I was piloting a tank or spaceship, after all, not sprinting around.

Laser-based weapons are almost defensive in nature, since they can shoot down incoming fire, often letting players remain stationary while they fight. Later, lasers won’t do enough damage to deal with tougher adversaries, so missiles become a better option. These take a few seconds to lock on to enemies, during which time players must keep the opponent within the targeting box, but once fired they’ll seek out the target. Players will be defenseless while acquiring a lock, however, encouraging some evasive maneuvers.

Most of this action happens within fairly simple locations. Apart from space, every area in Star Cruiser is built from square blocks, resembling the grid-based labyrinths of early role-playing games like the Wizardry series, Might and Magic, or (to use an example from this blog series) Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. There’s a small mini-map showing one’s local surroundings, which is often easier to use for navigation than the actual 3D view. Players will drive through narrow corridors, enter larger rooms that might contain some enemies, and find lots of single-use keys to open gates. There are some special encounters, as well as tricky elements like conveyor belts that only allow movement in one direction, but not much else to spice up different locations.

There are a lot of locations, though. Star Cruiser is a long game, taking players across multiple solar systems and dozens of planets as they follow its twisting storyline. It certainly has the length and story focus of a role-playing game, but I’m not sure I’d call it one, exactly. At least not the Mega Drive version; I gather that the original home computer version let players collect currency and buy items, and may have included more open-ended exploration as well. The Mega Drive version, however, feels closer to an adventure game. Of course, I’ve learned through this blog series that Japanese adventure games were a huge influence in early console role-playing games, lending their narrative structure to the genre in a manner that would become a defining characteristic of Japanese-style role-playing design. Some entries in this series — notably Ys I & II — feel like a fusion of adventure game and role-playing game, and Star Cruiser can be added to that list.

It’s not just the cast of recurring characters, each with their own portrait, who keep popping up in new places to converse and carry the story forward. There’s also the menu, summonable at any time during play, with its list of actions. This is mostly used to open gates with keys, or to repair one’s vehicle by spending some energy (fuel) to fix the hull. But players will also gather a small inventory of items, and sometimes must use them in certain places to progress. None of these quite qualify as puzzles, as there’s usually a clear hint about what must be done, but the motions feel like those of an adventure game. Talk with people, gather stuff, and use it in the right place.

Unlike adventure games, however, Star Cruiser’s story is linear. There may have been more free travel in the original version, but on the Mega Drive players can’t even visit a planet until they’ve found its beacon, so it’s simply a matter of following the story to each new location. A little disappointing, perhaps, but Star Cruiser relies on its action gameplay to keep things interesting, and I must reiterate just how impressive that action must have been in 1988. At a time when first-person perspectives in games were limited to still screens or turn-based dungeons, to be suddenly let free to roam and blast enemies would have been mind-blowing. Anyone encountering this game would have easily forgiven its somewhat repetitive locations and often confusing story, since they got to experience an epic adventure in glorious 3D.

I’m also fascinated by how the 3D graphics are rendered on the Mega Drive. I was tempted to say that it looks flat shaded, but I don’t think Star Cruiser has any lighting system at all. Instead, every polygon is assigned a color, or a dithered color pattern. The dithering reveals a quirk of the rendering process, since the color patterns might seem like primitive texture mapping, but clearly aren’t: the patterns are always in the same orientation on screen, no matter what the orientation of the 3D object is. It’s odd to see a striped pattern on the side of a futuristic tank that doesn’t turn when it does. Then again, Star Cruiser must have been at the forefront of polygon rendering techniques, which wouldn’t be standardized until years later.

It’s also likely that these rendering quirks looked much better on a CRT screen. I touched on this when writing about Super Win The Game for my Scratching That Itch series, but the classic pixel art in the 1980s and 1990s often looked a lot better due to the way CRT screens physically make images. Both the phosphor glow on the screen and a mismatch between the pixel size and phospor grid resulted in images that could appear higher resolution, with colors that blended together a bit. Skilled artists could take advantage of these effects to make images look more detailed and colorful than they actually were. It’s possible that the dithered and striped patterns in Star Cruiser, which can be a bit of an eyesore on modern screens, actually blurred together into nice uniform shades on the CRT televisions of the day.

But even if they didn’t, Star Cruiser would still have been incredibly impressive in 1988/1990. When researching for this post I learned that an English localization was in the works, but was eventually scrapped, which is a shame. If this had reached the US and Europe on the Mega Drive (or Sega Genesis, as it was known in the US) it could have had a huge impact, and changed the history of first-person 3D games. Unfortunately, it remained a Japanese exclusive, although it did get a sequel on home computer systems there in 1992. Thanks to the work of the Nebulous Translations team, hwoever, players can play it today and experience a bit of gaming history they may not have known about. Like other games for Sega’s Megadrive, I used the Genesis Plus GX emulator core with the Retroarch frontend to play. I just had to apply the translation patch and it worked like a charm.

Next up is the final game in this particular timeline detour, after which we’ll return to 1989 and continue onwards. Stay tuned!

EDIT: I’m kicking myself for forgetting to write about the music in Star Cruiser. The Mega Drive was famous for its FM synthesis capabilities, but it also had a PSG chip that was identical to that of its predecessor, the Master System, and composer Toshiya Yamanaka made use of both for Star Cruiser’s soundtrack. The music that stuck with me the most tended towards FM synthesis: I particularly enjoyed the relaxing music that plays when flying through space, as well as this tune which often played while I explored the surfaces of planets. But I also must mention the epic synth arpeggios that play when warping between solar systems, which I believe uses a lot of PSG sounds. The intro music is also a great example of combined FM synthesis and PSG tones. The music is great all around, with excellent rearrangements of the original PC-88 score.

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6 Comments

  1. It’s funny, those visuals don’t surprise me, because by 1988 we’d already had Elite, Mercenary, Zarch/Virus, and (in particular) Driller, but I wonder how well known any of those are outside the UK.

    That said, Star Cruiser is clearly a step beyond the quasi-wireframes of Elite and Mercenary, and the “textures” put it beyond Driller. It’s definitely an evolution of the form.

    • I’d heard of Elite, of course, but I think I place wireframe 3D in a different category (like Battlezone, mentioned in the post). I’d never heard of the others, though, and Driller (as you say) looks particularly similar to Star Cruiser. Star Cruiser has a stronger emphasis on combat, I think, but its 3D engine looks similar. Thanks for pointing this out! It makes me wonder how many other games may have done groundbreaking things, but were limited to local markets and never had a chance to make a global impact.

      • For what it’s worth, there’s some argument about whether Elite is wireframe, as it renders edges that are “behind” an object as invisible.

        Not that it matters for the present discussion, but I thought it worth mentioning, not least because I only just discovered it! I’ve known that game my whole life, and I never noticed that little graphical trick.

        • I also only learned about this when looking up Elite based on your original comment! I will say that, looking at screenshots, it still looks like wireframe to me, but it’s still pretty cool. I’ve also realized that I think about flight simulators as an earlier paradigm of 3D games versus first-person shooters. Enough so that I wasn’t even thinking of Elite in the same group as Star Cruiser, even though Star Cruiser also has (much simpler) space flight.

  2. I’m also reminded of Damocles, the sequel to Mercenary, which was more open in terms of play than the first, and had you flying around between planets as well as visiting the surface for various interactions. Like Star Cruiser it also occupies a fuzzy ground somewhere between first-person shooter, rpg, and adventure game. 1990 though, so SC has the advantage there.

    (Damocles also reminds me massively of Outer Wilds but that’s a discussion for another day.)

    I’m also reminded of the weird 1991 Bethesda Terminator game. Not an rpg, by most accounts, but it’s also an unusual entry into the first person 3d open world adventure/shooter hybrid genre.

    • It’s cool to hear about yet another fascinating-sounding Amiga game! I don’t know much about the Amiga, honestly, it was slightly before my time and also not very popular here in the US versus Europe.

      I’d also never heard of the Terminator game, which sounds weird and kind of cool. But it’s funny you mentioned it, because I do remember playing the demo for Bethesda’s 1995 game Terminator: Future Shock, and being blown away by its mouselook controls. That was the first time I’d encountered mouselook, and I remember thinking that it would transform how first-person shooters are played, which it did. Although most people were probably introduced to mouselook by Quake a year later.

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