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SoulStar prototype
by Marss
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It seems that the year 2003 is full of surprises. All the games that seemed
to be lost, suddenly re-appeared as protos, betas or even sources. It's kind
of a good move coz it may motivate some programers to revamp or write games
without having to torture themselves, so to say. The sources of Breakout2000,
Fight for Life, Primal Rage, AVP, Iron Soldier 2, Black Ice, White Noise and
so on can be bought for some bucks. There is one game I have been expecting
for years since its presentation in AEO and later in JEO. It's not American
Hero that will be available at the UK Jagfest in June. No, no...It's SoulStar.
The latter was released for the SegaCD format but none of us has ever seen a
picture of it till few weeks ago. So I browsed the Net to get info. Some
lucky ones possess protos and share tidbit about it.
all the missions appear in fact to be present. Letting the attract mode run
past the first two missions, it starts to move on to the ones that are
unreachable in the proto. Only the first phase of each mission is shown
(each mission comprising 3 phases) but there's still a LOT of variety to be
seen.
First up is the title screen. Second is the highscore table which seems
filled with real people who'd played the game. Interesting. This is a rather
nice effect, with the rainbow text gradually fading and shifting into
different colours, and fake-3D scaled-sprite asteroids heading towards the
player in the background.
First phase of the first mission is not shown.
Mission 2 looks terrible. All the textures seem corrupted, and playing
through the game nobody with the proto has got past here.
Mission 3 and on to the demo-only scenes. Some very nice grassy landscape in
evidence here, with sprite mountains as a background. The ground texture
changes to more muddy at the very end of the demo. Paths and vegetation-
encrusted rocks are all present along with the enemy buildings, and yes, you
can shoot the trees.
Mission 4 is very impressive - a 3D environment in which the player controls
a large walking mech. There is a gun turret on its back that swivels
automatically to follow targets flagged by the HUD - a very cool effect. It
is possible to stomp about, skim along at high speed (in straight lines) and
even jump/fly!
Mission 5 is also impressive, but from a graphical point of view. Nice water
textures as you fly over them at high speed, coupled with enemies that burst
from the depths in front of you makes this a highly exciting level. The
animated manga-style explosion in the background (complete with roiling clouds
of dust/smoke) is also very nice. The graphics bugs appear entirely connected
with a series of long, armed barges that pass by under the player at high
speed. Once there are no more on-screen everything clears up. Nice!
Mission 6 sees you on a lava-planet, complete with stretches of fire which
spout flames at the player (and messing up his shields). Some very impressive
visual effects when enemies are defeated (falling to the ground and exploding
in flames? ) as well as nice ground textures for the 'runway' areas make
this worth watching too.
Mission 7 is one of the most impressive : a 'Dune'-style landscape, with
turrets, landing pads and a plethora of enemies, all to an impressive sprite
background. Floating 'drone' enemies drop mines which fall into the sand in
a spray of dust, which explode and send laser pulses flying out as you fly
past. Nice touch. This level includes evil mechanical enemy centipede-things
which burst from the ground and then tunnel back down *right* in front of the
player and a HUGE boss, who features a laser chaingun and the ability to drop
enemy mechs at you.
Mission 8 is another space mission, with a bright-green nebula in the back-
ground and the standard complement of space fighters, as well as some giant
mechs who ride flying disks into battle, then leap off to face you...scary.
Then the demo sequence loops back to mission one, by which time you've
probably had enough.
The only slowdown occurs when a graphical bug hits (as in missions 2 and
4, though there are some in mission 5 too). These seem to be misaligned
texture references (ie the Jag is trying to use as a texture some memory which
doesn't contain image data) and this causes giant black blocks to flash on and
off, with scanline-type interference (as when viewing a misaligned image in
JagView).
As for it being released - well, this is *extremely* unlikely. There's some
serious legal issues just having people owning copies of this proto, and it
wasn't even Core doing the development (they out-sourced it). So don't hold
your breath, basically.
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