The Neo Geo was a truly mythical beast. The MVS was a mainstay of arcades in the 90s. Personally, I cut my teeth on many big red cabinet SNK classics back in the day. Fatal Fury and Art Of Fighting were certainly arcade mainstays for me, and I wished to bring those gorgeous games home. But alas, the AVS was something I've never seen in person. Even as I write this at the end of 2023. The closest I ever got to SNK's hardware was a Neo Geo Pocket Color, and that stupid Neo Geo X console that was an interesting idea, but horrible in execution.
Instead, my history with SNK's games have been outside of their own hardware. Back in the day, that meant picking up fighters on Sega CD and SNES. And eventually, there was the huge influx of SNK's back catalog on PS2. That really was a boon for me. But in modern times we have Hampster's Arcade Archives series. Basically, every month for the past however many years, Hampster has delivered a handful of new arcade ports to modern consoles. And I can attest that my PS5 is filthy with them. But let's rewind for a minute. Let's talk about SNK. That's a company that is well known for its fighting games. The short recap is this: the dude that made the original Street Fighter left Capcom before Street Fighter II. He made Fatal Fury for SNK, which he himself thought of as his own Street Fighter II. Then SNK made a bunch of other games and meshed them altogether to make The King Of Fighters, which continued on to be its own incredible series. At some point SNK remembered that arcade gamers liked other genres, so they figured they should at least make some other non-fighting games. And so in 1995 they released Pulstar, a shmup that is very much just "SNK's R-Type." Which makes not a lot of sense because although R-Type was popular, it was also released in 1987 and the shoot-em-up genre had advanced considerably since then. There's no denying that R-Type is a classic, though. Irem certainly knew what they were doing in 1987. So maybe SNK just figured why not do a retro throwback? Or maybe it's even trickier? I'm not really certain, but I do know that a bunch of ex-Irem employees formed Nazca Corporation who worked on the Neo Geo platform. They made games like Metal Slug and In The Hunt. But this is neither here nor there, because Pulstar was developed by Aicom, not Nazca. But still, it feels like SNK was really trying to capture that Irem vibe when they were picking up developers to make their non-fighting games. All I know is that some gamers really love R-Type. And I almost get it. It's a good game for 1987. It looks amazing. And it's also brutally hard, relying heavily on rote memorization and at least some level of luck. Pulstar is most certainly an R-Type clone. Like not even a little bit. It looks and plays and feels just like R-Type. The first level of each game is almost interchangeable. The quasi CG intro in Pulstar is bad, but fits into the 1995 gaming landscape. But this is a game that is entirely made for a very niche few. Imagine that you were a gamer in 1995 who had gone all in on Neo Geo. You had no other consoles, and yet you really wish you had access to R-Type? Well, at least you could play Pulstar. Much like R-Type, this is a game about being swarmed by enemies and collecting power-ups in a meaningful way. You want to grab the power-ups that stack into the loadout you want, while avoiding ones that you don't want. And you want to gather Speed. Also like R-Type, Pulstar does that thing where if you die you lose all your current power-ups and you have to reload from a checkpoint with no weapon upgrades whatsoever, instantly making your run almost insurmountable. As much as I love shmups, it's the sort of a shmup insanity that I just can't handle. It's the reason that I respect games like R-Type (and Gradius) but can never love them. Pulstar is exactly that kind of game. The sort of shmup I breeze through level one without losing a life. Then I die midway through stage two, lose all my upgrades, and just flounder while credit-feeding until I shut the game off in disgust. It's an archaic way to design shmups. It's not even rooted to its time. In 1995, we had way more interesting shmups. In the early 80s we had Xevious and Galaga, which were vastly better games. And later we had bullet-hells, which is where my heart lies with the genre. Pulstar feels like a relic from the late 80s and early 90s shmups which just feel transitional to me. They're too complex, but too simple The Arcade Archives release does at least offer up a few niceties, though. There's both Japanese and American versions of the coin-op included. And there's a Caravan mode, which is always appreciated. Though more for really good games I might want to devote time to. Pulstar unfortunately is not a really good game. Instead it's a clone of a really classic game that I just kind of like.
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