I believe this will be the last shoot 'em up I cover for this edition of Octurbo. There's only so much you can do with a screenshot LP of a shoot 'em up, given how functionally similar many of them are and the speed at which they move. The PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 is absurdly well represented in this genre, more so than any other of the core 16-bit consoles and I'm not sure why that is exactly, as the least technologically sophisticated console the TG-16 suffered the most from trying to keep multiple sprites on the screen at once and employing the various parallax scrolling techniques that are usually more prominent in these fast-paced games. I guess they just found a home here (and eventually in other marginalized consoles like the Saturn and Dreamcast).
Star Parodier is actually part of Hudson's Star Soldier franchise of sci-fi shoot 'em ups, and is to that series (and Hudson games in general) what Parodius is to Gradius (and Konami games in general). The big and really only main difference between the two franchises is that Star Soldier is a vertically-aligned affair, but beyond that Star Parodier kind of follows its better-known nutty inspiration to the letter, throwing all sorts of weird shit at the player and giving them a number of unusual spaceships to play as, each with their own idiosyncrasies. While the graphics are a little out there, the gameplay sticks close to the format of its more serious brethren, adopting similar power-ups and other systems. The game was actually developed by Kaneko, known for many prestigious contributions to gaming such as Gals Panic, rather than Hudson Soft themselves.
An interesting coincidence is that because this game belonged to Hudson it ended up being included with the rest of Hudson's library when it was sold off to another company after Hudson went out of business. That purchasing company just so happened to be Konami.
But hey, there's plenty more weirdness to get into today, and what better way than through screenshots (don't say video)? Seeing is believing, after all. Time is money, and what goes up must come down. A stitch in time sa- I'm just going to start this thing already.
"Satire Soldier" Would've Been a Better Name, But Then I Can Be Too Much of a Back Seat Punner At Times
Star Parodier isn't too bad, but it seems a little too easy and much of the insanity doesn't match up to Parodius. If anything, they're playing it way too safe (as in, lazy), with what seems to be a lot of stage ideas borrowed from Parodius and TwinBee. Seems kinda fitting that this game would default to Konami eventually.
This was, to the chagrin of any serious Star Soldier fan, the only CD Star Soldier game in the 16-bit era. The series would see a single N64 sequel (Star Solder: Vanishing Earth) and a few remakes for modern consoles. Konami being Konami doesn't seem to want to do much with any of its older properties these days, and I'm not sure the noble shoot 'em up has much market penetration these days anyway.
Still, this goofy little game did become available to the US and Europe eventually, via the Wii's Virtual Console. It's not terrible, and a lot easier than most games in this genre if you're someone like me who gets shot down so often that it becomes discouraging. Then again, you could also just play Eric Pope's new dream music shoot 'em up instead if you're in the market for one of these.
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