Star Blader (2024)
a COMMERCIAL game by ‘Retroguru’ for Atari Lynx
published by ‘DragonBox Shop’
Written for BrewOtaku #003 by Usman A. Khan
‘Barbarian’ meets ‘Star Wars’ — this could be the short sum-up for Star Blader. Royal siblings got attacked in their glider during a peaceful and diplomatic mission near planet ‘Xanesh 7’. A fancy dressed robot calling himself ‘General Luger’ seems to be the source of all troubles. Princess Alenia has gone missing, and Prince Elian has to fight odd clones of himself.
FIRE UP YOUR LASER SWORD!
The prince is being constantly attacked, and it’s serious about life and death. Different positions and fighting moves might help to attack specific body parts of your opponent. Ingame you will find details on these different moves and a training mode. One of the most spectacular moves is possibly chopping off the head of your enemy. The head falls to the floor, a few red pixels appear and a little green robot, passing by the playfield, kicks away this round remain. Is that disgusting or genius? We can’t tell, but what we can tell is, that this is nothing new either. UK based pixel-legend ‘Simon Butler’ has been responsible for the graphics, and you can clearly see his decades of experience, when it comes to pixel art. Every new background and sprite art seen by the eye is pure hand set pixel love.
Gisberto ‘nop90’ Rondinella picked up the challenge to write the Atari Lynx code, which was quite an intense task. The first demo of this game has seen daylight at the German demoparty ‘Revision’ in 2021. Michal ‘Miker’ Szpilowski provided the soundtrack, and especially the scenery in combination with his tunes, raises the overall atmosphere to another level.
Conclusion
Star Blader is a great but shortwhile hack and slash game, which is difficult and requires dedicated training. Can you defeat Luger and rescue your sister? If you own a ComLynx cable, you can train against another fellow player. Not many new Lynx games have this feature, which makes this title outstanding. Oh, no shit: American-German author ‘Mark Wamsler’ wrote a short novel about the story, which is delivered with the boxed game as well.
