Darius (Genesis) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
270A playthough of Sega's 2019 shoot 'em up for the Sega Genesis, Darius.
This video shows three separate gameplays: The first is of the bottom path as Proco (normal difficulty level), ending on stage V.
The second, beginning at 27:48, is of the boss rush mode, showing all twenty-six of the game's bosses fought in succession.
The third, beginning at 1:10:20, is of the top path as Tiat (easy difficulty level), ending on stage Z.
Darius was originally released in arcades by Taito in 1987. It is widely considered a classic of the shooter genre, and was the first title in a landmark series that helped to define Taito as a highly-respected developer in the 80s and 90s.
The game is often fondly remembered for its offbeat soundtrack (by Taito's celebrated in-house band Zuntata) and its robot-fish theme, but anyone that has ever played Darius in an arcade is likely to best recall what an impressively large piece of machinery the cabinet was: Darius featured an ultra wide-screen display that made use of three separate monitors (and some clever trickery with mirrors) to display an image with a nearly seamless 4:1 aspect ratio.
Of course, that screen configuration would be impossible to achieve on any non-purpose built hardware at the time, but that didn't stop Darius from being ported to various home platforms, including numerous 8 and 16-bit computers, the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and several variants of the PC Engine hardware. The quality of these ports varied widely, but they all had to make compromises to compensate for the screen shape and a dramatically lowered resolution.
And while this brand new port of Darius to the Sega Genesis, released through the Sega Genesis Mini system a few months back, doesn't overcome this limitation, it is arguably the closest representation of the game to ever appear on console hardware from the original coin-op's era. Even though the game was not released on a cartridge, it is a legitimate piece of Genesis/Mega Drive software that plays correctly on original hardware.
There was a fair amount of hubbub surrounding the origins of this port - it was initially developed by fan, and it was later tweaked and refined under the direction of Taito themselves to ensure that it met their quality standards, and as such, Darius is an officially licensed port.
So after all of that, how well did they pull it off?
Quite well, I'd have to say! The game is harder and faster moving than the arcade version because of the crunched screen space, but it seems that great care was put into creating as accurate a facsimile as possible.
The sprites and backgrounds look fantastic, showing little evidence of the Genesis's color limitations, and the action runs at an impressive speed without any slowdown and little sign of flicker. The music isn't quite "arcade perfect," but it does make a valiant effort with the system's FM synth, and the digital samples are surprisingly clear of the dirty, staticy distortion than plagued so many other Genesis titles.
Darius on the Genesis is a 32 megabit ROM, and the presentation clearly reflects the benefits of such a large storage capacity - for the sake of comparison, look at the Genesis's port of Darius II, Sagaia. It was smashed in a 8 megabit ROM, and the difference is huge. Of course, a 32 megabit cartridge would've been hellaciously expensive to produce in 1990 when Sagaia was released, which would explain why we never saw such cart sizes on 16-bit machines until years later.
The gameplay feels smooth, but if you're expecting an easy ride, you'll quickly find yourself in for a rude awakening. There are patterns and tricks to defeating every enemy and boss in the game, but Darius is not a game that can be breezed through. It takes a lot of sweat and blood to learn it well enough to play it reliably well, just as was the case for the arcade game.
I still can't believe I managed to finish the boss rush without dying! That took a solid couple dozen attempts to manage, but what a feeling of accomplishment it gave to do it!
Darius was an ace arcade experience, and this Genesis version does an admirable job of recapturing as much of it as humanly possible on such limited hardware. If you love Genesis shoot 'em ups, this one is well worth spending some time with.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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