Tetra Star: The Fighter (Famicom) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
133A playthrough of Taito's 1991 Japanese-exclusive 3D shoot 'em up for the Nintendo Famicom, Tetra Star: The Fighter.
Tetra Star is a thoroughly impressive shoot 'em up that was developed by Home Data (who also developed Cosmic Epsilon and Sqoon) and never saw any release beyond it's original Japan-only debut for the Famicom/NES. It plays very similarly to Konami's Gyruss, and it looks a great deal like Space Harrier and 3D World Runner (or the GBA's Iridion 3D, for a somewhat more modern comparison). This is all made possible with tons of technical wizardry with the 8-bit hardware, including techniques to manipulate scanline timing and background scrolling speeds in order to create an effective simulation of a 3D playing field.
The graphics themselves are pretty well done. The standard enemy sprites are kept simple, but there are some huge, nicely detailed boss enemies that pull their own nifty animation tricks (just check out that wave effect as you blow up the Arkanoid-head looking enemy base!). The floors look amazing with how smoothly they animate, looking a lot like *very* early/limited mode 7 style scrolling, as do the backgrounds - many of them feature mini "vignettes" to convey parts of the story (like that opening group of ships blowing up the Statue of Liberty!), and the interior levels use the ceiling and wall graphics to give a solid feel to the 3D effect.
There are also a ton of shout-outs to Star Wars here, not the least of which being the stage where you sneak into the enemy base cloaked as a Tie Fighter.
You fly "into" the screen, shooting at enemies as they fly in from the sides of the screen, from behind you, and from in front, with the distance of the enemies and their projectiles indicated by the size of the sprite - though it's not "scaling" per se, the smaller the object is, the further away from your ship it is. Over the course of the game you gain access to four different types of special weapons, some of which are utterly useless, and others are utterly indispensable in some of the later boss battles.
Not content just to sit on the technical achievement with the game's graphics, Home Data went all out on every aspect of the Tetra Star's presentation. The are unique voices to announce each of the special weapons a la Gradius, and the music is comprised of royalty-free classical tunes, but they've been given a heavy dose of bombastic, early 90s style by being infused with loads of digital samples. I love the way it sounds, but it can get obnoxious with how noisy it tends to be. The overall sound design reminds me a great deal of what Kaze did with Zombie Nation's soundtrack.
It also goes the extra mile with how it develops the plot - the game has full cinematic scenes between stages that explain the flow of the story, and it even has a "branching path" based on how you play! Your sidekick Omega can be killed if you get captured near the end, and if this happens, you'll see a completely optional set of lengthy cutscenes as they interrupt the action to impress on you the consequences of your failure. I got caught during this playthrough (29:39) so I could show this scene. Doing this changes the ending of the game, so after the final credit roll (42:19), I included the scenes from the ending that you'd only get to see if Omega survived the mission intact.
I really like Tetra Star. It's an example of a game that makes itself stand out because of the gimmicks done with its graphics, but even without them, it would still be a good game. It's smooth, plays well, isn't *too* difficult (though not particularly easy), and it really pushes the NES hardware hard.
If you've ever been a fan of pseudo-3D shooters - especially Gyruss or Cosmic Epsilon - I'd absolutely recommend giving this one a try, especially since an English-patch is available for the rom.
*The game is shown in English thanks to Gaijin-Production's translation patch. You can find that at romhacking.net if you're interested. The unpatched game is, of course, in Japanese*
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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