StarGlider (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
69StarGlider is a fast 3D planet shooter, coded by Jeremy San, and Richard Clucas, and unleashed onto the computer gaming scene in 1987. This is a rather early 3D flight sim, but it handles well on all CPUs, and it is fun, but a rather challenging game.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 1st Dec 2022 - 24th Dec 2022
Edited: 26-31 July 2023
Narrated: 26th July 2023
This one is another game which I only learned how to play after watching a Lukozer review several years ago. With this being a 3D themed season, I thought it was about time that I dug it out, and learned how to play it. The fundamentals were simple enough, but I was struggling to play it. The makers of the From Bedrooms films contacted me about ripping some footage for a backers pack there were working on. Shamefully I recorded as much as I had learned up until that point, but I could not get off level 1. So ashamedly, I went back to the game a few weeks later, and recorded this footage.
This video features a clip from Dave Lowe's album A Temporal Shift which I backed, just before the intro music to the game itself.
Starglider was shown on 1980s ITV show Get Fresh, along with Xenon and several others. No footage of the game on the show exists, and very little footage of the show remains. However, sidekick on the show Gilbert the Alien did get two spinoff video games released; one of them on the Amiga.
Danscore:
It is difficult to image a time when wireframe 3D was the cutting edge. Back in the 1980s, people got to play Mercenary, but for every good 3D game, there was a whole bunch of poor ones, mostly using the freescape engine. For 1987, this feels like it came back from the future. The graphics are fast and flow smoothly enough on most systems, unless the action gets packed. The most notable candidate is the projectile spitting gun towers, which can slow the frame rate down enough to be able to avoid them. The concept is easy to get into but once once players understand how they are supposed to get a recharge. Then everything begins to open out, and becomes playable. The enemies always aim on target, and trying to aim a missile on a walker or anything smaller than a Starglider is often a difficult task. Each play is almost totally random, so it can be a matter of luck to find a recharge point which is unprotected by tanks, turrets and walkers. It's a neat idea, but not many people sing the praises of this game, unlike it's infinitely much deeper sequel - Starglider 2. For it's day, I give this a 6.5. There is fun to be had by trying to win an almost unwinnable battle on level 1, but by level 2, the player is slaughtered by the difficulty, and this feels intimidating. This harms replay value, and it can be difficult to justify spending the time to have ones bottom kicked by the computer in this game, mostly due to random factors which are out of the players control.