Thursday, October 21, 2010

Strider: One Story...Two Completely Different Interpretations


The late 80s was a great time to be a gamer, especially in arcades. Capcom was undoubtedly one of the best publishers out there, and their arcade division was no different. In 1989, Capcom released one of it's great triumphs in arcade gaming, Strider. the player controls Hiryu as he attempts to defeat "The Grandmaster" and free the world from his tyranny. This game featured tight controls, a great soundtrack which featured speech from different languages, which gave the game a truly international flair. Strider proved to be one of Capcom's biggest hits, and it received multiple ports to home consoles. Then there was the puzzling decision that led to one of Capcom's most polarizing game ever.

The NES version of Strider started out as three pronged effort between Capcom and Moto Kikaku. This effort included the NES version which specifically followed the storyline of a manga, the arcade version, and the aforementioned manga(for the uninformed, manga is pretty much a Japanese Comic Book. Most anime starts it's life as manga.). Since the NES version seemed to follow the plot of the manga more than the arcade version did, and since the manga never saw American shores, most gamers were confused as all hell as to what was going on in the NES version of Strider. A lot of confusing backtracking takes place in the game, along with a lot of item collection that turned fans of the arcade game off. In my opinion, the NES version of Strider wasn't necessarily a bad game, it just strayed so far from the arcade game that it ended up turning a lot of gamers off.

The NES version is simply a distant memory for most gamers now, and the arcade game is as popular as ever, especially with Capcom's reissue of it as part of their "classics collection" series. Strider is easily one of the games that put Capcom on the map, and without a doubt both versions should be experienced by anyone who can hold a controller.








1 comment:

  1. Arcade Strider was amazing, and the NES version didn't really compare, but was good in its own right. Like Sega's Shinobi.

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