Blog:Night Striker Strikes Nightly on Mega CD

Night Striker Strikes Nightly on Mega CD

by CRV (talk) | Originally posted June 3, 2022

When it comes to games that were clearly inspired by Space Harrier, Taito's Night Striker stands head and shoulders above the rest. The cyberpunk setting, great music, and fast action come together to create an arcade game experience with that unique Taito flair.

Someone at Taito must have thought enough of the Mega CD to commission a version of Night Striker for it. That may have been a mistake, because it looks like an extremely pixelated mess.

Personally, I find the Mega CD version to still be enjoyable and very playable despite its looks. But that playability obviously came at a great technical cost.

Kenji Kaido, director of the original arcade version, supervised the Mega CD version, the only home version on which he did so. He said on Twitter that "the contractor seemed to have decided that if they reduce the resolution, they could reproduce the game and maintain the sense of speed."

Kaido also recalled "that the contractor in charge of porting the game worked on it with great enthusiasm." They did not have the source code, however, as was so often the case back then, and so they had to disassemble and analyze the arcade ROMs.

It was Aisystem Tokyo that was responsible for porting Night Striker to the Mega CD. They also developed the Mega CD version of The Ninja Warriors, the Saturn version of Darius Gaiden, and the PlayStation version of G Darius. I'd really like to see a postmortem on the development of Mega CD Night Striker if they can actually find anybody who worked on it.

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