Blog:Over Horizon (FC/NES)

CRV 09:05, 24 June 2012 (CDT) [permalink] [comments]

Hot-B's Over Horizon is a horizontal shooting game with a difference: you can shoot backwards and forwards at will. That's almost enough to justify whatever they're charging on eBay. (It also never made it out Stateside.)

Moreover, everything about the game is solid, from the graphics to the music by Masaharu Iwata to the large bosses. And there are interesting features throughout the stages - for example, you must shoot switches to open doors in stage 2 and maneuver through ice blocks in stage 3.

There's even an edit mode where you can change the power of your weapons and the position of your options. But why is it here? It appears to be a holdover from the beginning of development.

According to former Hot-B employee Yoshinori Satake in an interview with the Japanese magazine Shooting Gameside (English translation here), "Hot-B was in talks with a company that had made an RPG with edit capabilities similar to RPG Maker, and they proposed using their engine to make a shooting game." He was likely referring to Pixel and Dungeon Kid, a Famicom game in which you can edit your own first-person dungeons.

At some point, the focus shifted to doing a normal shooter, and Hot-B eventually took over development. "The stages they had made were about half completed, and the graphics were very weak, and we decided at Hot-B that we needed to fix it up," said Satake. What you see is a vastly overhauled version of the game.

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