Lightening Force Quest for the Darkstar

Channel:

Absolute Longplay

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Published on July 30, 2018 6:41:19 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OSbMrQyOpQ

Game:

Thunder Force IV (1992)

Duration: 49:45

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Thunder Force IV, originally released in North America as Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar, is a shoot 'em up developed and published by Technosoft for the Mega Drive in 1992. It is the fourth installment in Technosoft's Thunder Force series, and the third and final one created for the Mega Drive. It was developed by the team at Technosoft that ported Devil's Crush to the Mega Drive rather than the team that developed the previous Thunder Force games. Like its predecessors, it is a horizontally scrolling shooter, but it also features extensive vertical scrolling with large playing fields.

The game was considered by journalists as one of the best shooters on the Mega Drive when it was launched. Critics especially praised the game's graphics, including the vertical and parallax scrolling for illustrating the immense environments. Some believed that underneath the graphical sheen, the game play was relatively average however. Thunder Force IV was released on the Sega Saturn in Japan in 1996, and will be re-released again worldwide in 2018 for the Nintendo Switch.

Thunder Force IV was developed in Japan by Technosoft as the third Thunder Force game for the Mega Drive. Only the sound department was brought over from the original staff of Thunder Force II (1988) and Thunder Force III (1990), the rest of the team had previously ported the pinball game Devil's Crush to the Mega Drive. They chose to develop Thunder Force IV when given the opportunity to develop an original game. Having taken the reins for the Thunder Force series, the team felt a responsibility to surpass the quality of earlier series titles. They borrowed code from the previous games, and built upon it using what they learned when porting Devil's Crush. According to music and sound team head Naosuke Arai, the composer for Thunder Force IV debuted on Thunder Force III and also composed some original music for Devil's Crush, where he showed great improvement. The sound team staff were fans of heavy metal, so they worked on finding a method to create an electric guitar sound using the Mega Drive's FM synthesizer. They ran into difficulties and eventually settled on using the system's distortion sound effects to positive results.