![Strider (UE) [!]_002](https://3pstart.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/strider-ue-_002.gif?w=300&h=210)
Hang gliders: the high tech travel we have ready for us in 30 years.
Sega Mega Drive
Capcom
(c) 1990
Genre: Action Platformer
Back in the 80s, you could generally know three things about ninjas: they would take down hordes of faceless enemies with little to no effort, they weren’t good at hiding, and they were usually the good guys. Strider Hiryu is the protagonist in this story of a sort of dystopian future ninja in the year 2048, sent to assassinate the terrifying dictator known as Grandmaster using his mechanical animal companions, and his laser beam tonfa. This game was definitely written with every cool thing in the 80’s in mind, but how well did this hack-and-slash play?
![Strider (UE) [!]_007](https://3pstart.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/strider-ue-_007.gif?w=300&h=210)
Your first boss. The red parliament transforms into a horrifying robotic centipede wielding the hammer and sickle of communism. Holy $#@&, comrades.
On top of that? It was written in tandem with a manga.
The game opens dropping our deadly protagonist Strider Hiryu off on a hang glider, right into the action of a Gibsonesque, futuristic USSR (which, as we all know, will certainly survive until 2048). Your enemies are a mixture of intimidating and wacky characters – from gun toting, grim faced soldiers to wacky robots wearing coonskin caps. To the games credit, the intimidating enemies do outweigh the weirder ones. The bosses and minibosses tend to be a combination of the two.
After a force field is closed behind you to trap you in from your kamikaze hanglider drop, the game begins. Acclimating to the controls, you start taking out a few goons with your tonfa and jumping about like a circus acrobat. You can either jump straight into the air and attack everything in front of you, do a vaulting cartwheel while attacking everything in your path, do a sliding kick and hitting at things with your laser tonfa, or of course, the classic walking forward and slashing out at the baddies. To top it off, you can hang onto most walls and ceilings. For the time, this was innovation, and a considerable amount of variety over other games of the era.
![Strider (UE) [!]_012](https://3pstart.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/strider-ue-_012.gif?w=300&h=210)
My favorite miniboss is definitely a combination of scary and strange. I give you Mechakong. Are you not entertained!?
Strider’s gameplay is broken into a standard five stages, varied from all extremes: it starts off in crazy cyberpunk USSR fighting soldiers, robots and wrestlers, and you will eventually end up in the amazon fighting, surprisingly enough, amazons. You can pick up power ups in the form of your robopals Option A, Option B and Option C (an odd flying mushroom like droid, a robotic saber-toothed tiger and a robohawk, respectively), a lengthened version of your normal sword slash, a kanji that extends your healthbar, a kanji that restores health, a final kanji that restores all of your health, and the classic extra life. The game is more forgiving than other arcade ports, and even if it would take a few tries, doesn’t feel like the quarter muncher that many other machines had been.
![Strider (UE) [!]_008](https://3pstart.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/strider-ue-_008.gif?w=300&h=210)
Strider Hiryu is a grade-A badass. Even Grand Master’s posturing says so.
Give the Sega port a try for yourself at archive.org!