272 · Destination Earthstar
Two centuries ago, an alien species known as the Kojans kidnapped the people of Earth and made them their slaves. But the Earthlings never gave hope of returning to their homeland. So they sent you, a brave space ship pilot, to travel through the galaxy in search of the Earth. But beware, as the Kojans won't let you pass without a fight!
Imagineering made this for Acclaim in 1990, and it is two games in one: a slow 3D cockpit dogfighter where you clear an eight by eight grid, then a Gradius-style shmup inside each enemy base. Joe was out, so Mike and Sean played it. The plot was the most interesting thing about it.
The plot
You descend from humans who were kidnapped, kept in a zoo and enslaved, and now you have a ship and an expedition to find Earth. We liked that. Then it undercuts itself: the aliens just let you go, and the enemy is an unnamed third party, which we called terrestrial terrorists.
The cockpit
- A grid full of nothing. Numbers tell you how many ships are in a square, zero is a planet, A is an armory and B is a base. Most squares are blank, and we asked why a game that isn't a simulator needs the empty space.
- Weak dogfights. Enemies rarely fire unless they have the perfect shot, so the fight is targeting, then slowing down to circle back and lock on again. The stars crawl past, so there is no sense of speed.
- A good control idea, a strange pause. Holding B and using the D-pad makes the z-axis easy, and we praised that. Pausing takes A and B together, while Start cycles weapons.
- The HUD. It is red text, like an Apple II console, and not the Top Gun or Infiltrator cockpit we loved.
The shmup
This is where it loses people. It feels like someone handed them the code for a shmup, but they never played one. The bases are claustrophobic, full of missiles laid like traps, and you cannot move the ship freely. One shot kills you.
Die three times and you go back out for another 20 minutes of space. The bosses are two circles, then two rectangles, and the first is a couple of turrets you shoot three or four times. The level is harder than the boss.
Worth knowing
Every level is the same loop with more enemies and a harder shmup. You know within 15 minutes if you like it, which beats 40 hours.
The final boss is a nebula-looking thing. Text then welcomes you home and shows a destroyed planet, though we weren't sure it was Earth. The game restarts and even your score resets.
The bottom line
Skip it. Nobody voted it onto the Essential Games List, though Joe was absent, so there were only two votes. The shmup isn't what sinks it: the loop is bare and stale from the very beginning. The 3D parts are pleasant enough but slow and unchallenging.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- Pull out of warp speed and lock on your Neutron Torpedos - NOW!
- NES Longplay
- Introductions
- We mostly talk about lack of plots, so I wanted to highlight the developers of Earthstar for coming up with a creative “space” game that still keeps the idea of Earth at the forefront.
- All that goodwill on storytelling is immediately forgotten when you realize they named the players ship SPACESHIP EARTHSHIP
- Overview
- Platform/Puzzle game where you play as Dash Galaxy, navigating a series of rooms looking for keys to continue climbing the asylum.
- Gameplay
- The layout
- 8x8 grid, # enemies, (0)planets, (A)rmories, (B)ase, and blanks
- Do you need the empty spaces
- XYZ tracking
- Learning the controls
- B plus directional pads for changing speeds, warp drive
- B and select for views
- Pause: Press A and B simultaneously
- Each enemy is a battle
- Multiple shots
- Not many options for maneuvering
- Lasers have cooldown
- SHMUP base attacks
- The layout
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- None, imagineering and acclaim
- EGL
- Next week - Rollerball
- NEStalgia Byte - Cocoron
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Destination Earthstar, pull out of warp speed and lock on your Neutron Torpedos. Now! Destination Earthstar, and welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. Destination Earthstar, and Joe is out looking for Sam, we're hoping we can find both of them, they're missing, for some longer than others. Destination Earthstar, one went out for cigarettes, one went out looking for love, I'm hoping they both come back soon. Destination Earthstar, maybe one of them fell in love with cigarettes. Destination Earthstar, I mean, it happens to the best of us.
Destination Earthstar, every now and again. Destination Earthstar, you know, Sean, since it's just you and me, maybe, we can relax a little bit, and instead we could just talk about the plot of destination earth star before we get into the whole game oh please yes you know we mostly talk about a lack of plots so i kind of wanted to highlight the developers of earth star for coming up with a creative you know outer space game that still keeps the idea of earth at the forefront because uh even though they made it clear that uh you know this does not take place on earth and that you are uh from an alien planet you were
originally like your ancestors were from earth and so as the player you have this kind of attachment being like hey i'm from earth i want to help these people the characters i play as in the game get to earth is that a stretch i mean it's not a stretch that is exactly like the the base plot of this game um but it still kind of finds a way to uh undercut it um and that's not just with the whole concept of you know these games have throwaway plots that are mostly just there to give some kind of reasoning for what you're doing um but because that this plot with like i forgot the name of the
what's the name of the alien race yeah uh darn divino okay the the xylaks maybe it's xylaks that sounds great maybe it's something similar yeah um apparently a couple hundred years ago they um they kidnapped a bunch of humans like on a ship or something and then they put them in a zoo and then they kept like you know breeding them or something which is kind of fucked up but um then they became slaves they're not humans anymore they're just chattel and then and then they became presumably like second class citizens and then they're like equal um so all this happens on like the first page of the manual um uh and now
you guys have money and apparently you know the alien race has a similar like venture capital uh system going where they could do like an expedition to go and find earth yeah um so that's you not not too far off from the plot of slaughterhouse five um if you just if you just take the part where they're in a zoo and they're uh being studied but it looks or titan ae it looks like it's uh cojan is the name of the alien um which isn't cojan yeah that's not cool yeah whatever you had it's not as cool alien races should always start with like x's or z's or something or a's for alien you know like cojan is
like i don't know who that is kind of sounds like a like some street guy at least it's not though like at least it's not mars right like that's tired when it's aliens from mars or even even when they try to go like with the other m planet on our solar system mercury it's like oh that's a twist right like they this time the aliens are in our solar system but they're not from mars it's like still kind of tired like i like this idea that you're so far away from earth but now you've like stolen the equipment of the of your of the aliens that enslaved you and you're trying to break free but you're also like being tracked down by them so you figure oh what the heck might as well
infiltrate all their bases no mike you're completely misunderstanding the plot okay the cojans are like they're kind of like a non-entity like they they're just like you are you know you are an equal among them they just let you go like you paid for the ship you paid for the fuel and the food and the whatever like they're just like oh have fun guys um you who you're fighting is like some and that's this is sort of what i meant by they kind of undercut it because this is such a unique at least in up to 1990 nes terms a unique story that the re that the shoehorning in of an enemy is just like
some unnamed like terror like terrestrial terrorists which you know if you wanted it to make plot sense i would i would have made it the uh the race that enslaved you instead it's like like oh everything's fine like they're letting you go and then it's just this third party that they don't actually flesh out at all and i'm just glad i get to complain about an undeveloped plot you know yeah that seems very strange i like my story better and i'm not ashamed to admit that i'm i think it is better now granted there's no story in the game so it's not like it really matters to begin with that this is somebody
who wrote this in the span of two pages so you know whatever but like your head canon is just as useful yeah my head canon if anything like that's the that's the joy of these older video games that you kind of make up the plot right like you you this yeah this story could have been whatever you wanted to be if you if you rented this from blockbuster without a manual right you didn't have to even understand the story instead you just say like oh this is a an advanced earth civilization and we're fighting aliens that are coming to earth and they're heading to destination earth star not you true true or you could be pp trend yeah you could pretend that you're the invader coming to invade
earth but you know all of this goodwill towards the plot and you know me celebrating them it's immediately uh forgotten or at least they've abandoned all hope for a good plot because they named the like the ship that you fly the player's ship is named spaceship earth ship you can't use ship twice and you're just saying space and earth which are two things that are like kind of in the title of the game too so it's like spaceship earth ship is such a that's a that's like a first round of notes thing you know like there's no way that could have actually passed well you i mean i don't know you remember
the the ship that the pilgrims landed uh in the in america with it was called the um the europe ship america right right you name a ship by like where it comes from and where it's going right so by your logic it should have been cogent ship earth ship pretty much but you know i guess you know you can futz it around with the first part but it has to be the second part needs to be named after the destination you think anybody's ever named their boat like the friendship i would imagine at least some some person has yeah um all right all right time to talk about the game would you name your ship no no no
uh i don't know you know if i was gonna name my ship uh i always think about um in the simpsons uh it's a throwaway thing with mcbane but the uh mcbane sidekick who dies in the very same scene has a boat that he's going to retire on called the ss live forever and i think that's so funny
that is a very simpsons simpsons yeah yep there you go okay so what we're playing here all right is like two different games it's one of those ones again where you know it's uh it's part shooter with uh the whole like you know 3d cockpit dog fighting uh you know 8x8 grid map where you've got to track down the enemy alien ships and then take them on one by one but then the other part of the game is this shmup game where like you know it's it's copying gradius in a lot of ways but it controls
nothing like gradius and it's very long and very tedious and uh so is technically the uh the shooter 3d cockpit stuff so you kind of forget that you're switching between these games because each one of them takes so long to clear through i i don't want to like i don't want to give away like my thoughts too much um but if we just focus on the 3d cockpit for a second right that whole dog fighting aspect you know
are they covering any new ground than the other uh you know pseudo 3d shooters that we played on the nes here i i'd say no um i think so the the 3d like piloting sections they're very they're very slow paced um i think in comparison to the other games that we've played like this um whose names mostly escape me as they usually do when i talk about games we've played in the past um i would say that
the navigation tools are a bit more clear and easy to use than those games that we played in the past but there's nothing new happening um you go to you know the you go to the circles those are planets you might find something there but most likely you won't and it'll just waste your time you go to the numbers and that kind of shows you how many like how many ships are in that sector and you you know you
just do a standard dog fight to kill them in like the same in a kind of simpler way than like top gun like we just played um and uh there's a couple other places you could go to restock on fuel and and i guess like missiles and stuff but uh you just kill everyone on the screen it's probably gonna take you at least 10 minutes because it takes a while to get across the map and all the enemies are kind of scattered unless you you spam hyperspace and i guess that uses a lot of energy so i tried to
stick below light speed um and then once you clear everyone out you go to the base and that's where like the the side scroll not side scroller the shmup happens right and so just to you know talk about just the grid right the eight by eight grid that um mostly is filled with a bunch of blank spaces uh and then otherwise it's like like space yeah that's true it's like uh but then it's also like
battleship but as if you can see the opponent's screen the whole time and i don't understand this design point i i you it'd be like in legend of zelda if um you didn't if you already had the maps but you had them on the overworld too so it was like you already knew the locations of where the where to go were it's just that now it's like oh well but can you walk to them like yeah i i can
because there's nothing in my way you are describing you were describing every mini map in video that's true it's true but i guess i'm you know keeping it uh nes uh you know uh nes the fide because yes for lack of a better word because the the grid is telling you exactly the number of enemies that you're going to run into in a particular square or uh if it's a zero it's a planet if it's an a it's an armory a b for base those are cute a and r a for armory b for base i like those zero for planet
i don't know uh it's a circle right they just you know they did the shorthand yeah but the b kind of looks like a circle too just the way the text is so i would argue that the the planet should have just been a p at that point right to also go for the same kind of first letter of the word is you want to add lines to the planet yeah yeah or it's like a bit it's like a big antenna right these are advanced
species they should be having planets with big antennas to talk to each other how do you expect to communicate with aliens like in the future yeah we need you're right we need to be building these antennas now because it takes a while to get them that tall all right um the point i wanted to make about the grid yeah the point i wanted to make about the grid is that uh all those blank spaces
you kind of covered it by saying that's what space is like but this isn't a simulator in the slightest in my opinion i'm not putting it in the simulator genre at all so do you need the empty spaces this is a video game things should be happening is it exciting when you enter this eight by eight grid and the the nearest eight spaces to you are all blank okay so i think that even though it's not a
simulator i do think that there needs to be some like liminal situation where it's not like always in battle like if you're trying to make this about sort of explore i mean it's not really exploring so i'm kind of i'm talking myself out of this right now but if it's going to be this system of here's your zone clear out this zone and then move on it needs to have some kind of
uh texture to it of like emptiness and uh points of interest otherwise you may just have it be like a linear level like it should just be a first person's first person shmup leading into a side scrolling shmup you know what i mean yeah yeah absolutely like um forget for a second that uh it is a 3d space and that they even map they go to the trouble of the x y and z axis and like you
can see your coordinates across all three and stuff um yeah if you didn't have that and it was more of a on rails thing it would be even closer to the closest video game i could think of while playing this which is starfox um starfox 2 yeah uh specifically if you ever played down the super nintendo um but the the way that you know this xyz works especially with the mostly one-on-one enemy fights is uh is very cool if the enemies were actually any good at fighting uh yeah i don't know
what that's about i don't know like why they don't fire as often as we do like as the player the only thing really stopping you from using your laser is the fact that it overheats but to the enemy it's like if i don't have the perfect shot i'm not shooting at the player and that just it makes this really weird weak dog fighting where the actual obstacle of the fight between you and the enemy is just can you target them can you slow down your speed enough so that you can maneuver around them lock back on on them and then hit them i i don't think that that's enough i think i think they should
have had a little more prowess to them one thing i'm gonna circle back to that in a second but one thing that i do want to give them praise for is something that like we've kind of called for in games that want to have more inputs than this controller can do and that's having like you hold down a button and you mess with the d-pad and that like modifies what you're trying to modify so that makes this whole z-axis thing a lot more accessible is because it's easy to navigate that because it offloaded other controls to this sort of hold button to modify thing so i just wanted to
give that praise there it's all happening through the uh b button plus the directional pads and even the b button plus select at the same time which is a true might be a unique input on the nes i don't think we've seen that one yet and that's to bring the map up and down right yes so not necessarily the most useful have any reason to right yeah um but but going back to just how the dogfights go um i think that everything that you said is true and i'm leaning towards like oh they didn't want it to
be as uh frustrating as other games that do this with like oh it's so fast that you have to keep like retracking them even though that might be part of the fun of the game i think another part of this that makes it less fun is that there is no sense of speed in this game like you've got stars flying past you which means that you're ripping uh and you're always going faster than light but they move so slowly and they're always moving like that no matter where whether you're in a fight or you're going
between spaces um or trying to land at the base like it's just this constant sort of crawl so there's no it doesn't feel like it's edge of your seat like dogfight it's just like oh he's kind of floating towards me like oh he's kind of floating farther away now it should have been a uh it should have been a battle inside of an asteroid uh belt so this way we could complain about all the asteroids in the game and how we keep knocking ourselves into them mm-hmm sean you're talking about the unique controls and it's a shame joe's not here but uh i can't let us forget that the way to pause
this game is to press the a and b button together two things that do things in this game when pressed separately when pressed together stop all action in the game yeah that's probably one of the weirdest decisions that they made um because you know you could still use start for that to the best of my knowledge start doesn't do anything in this game i think it like does it not i can't remember what's maybe start um maybe start is how you cycle through the weapons but i thought that was yes
i think oh okay now you got me confused nope it says it says something's going on to select a new weapon press the start button so we're okay i mean even then just like okay now hold b and start like you've already introduced this concept right right and then you know we always talk about this with the cockpits and uh how oh it's so cool that everything means something uh that novelty is wearing off for me at this point and maybe it's the fact that it's really uh you know complicated here uh not necessarily complicated in that it's impossible to understand everything still functions everything still works
but it's all just red text and it's not necessarily like displayed in a way that like you know in the in the top gun episode or even the infiltrator episode we were talking about how cool those cockpits were because one they looked like cockpits and then they had all the information with stuff working on them this one's more like oh we included a um you know an apple 2 uh text only version of the computer console into the things this way technically you're still getting all the information you need but i can't read that on the fly as well as i could the other cockpits well
you wouldn't need to like that that's sort of been an issue that's been ongoing with this trope like with these huds it's kind of a stretch to say that most of it is necessary information and this one even more so uh you don't need to know your heading like you don't need to know exactly the uh x y and z coordinates that you're at or even what angle that you're traveling at like basically everything that's necessary is the map um the sort of radar scopes and the like eight dot speedometer pretty much uh in the center everything else is extraneous you don't really need to look at
it it just makes it look more complex every enemy in this game is a battle it's not a uh oh you shot them and then they go blow up or you know fall endlessly into space now i don't know how that would work um if they if ships don't blow up but they run out of power do you still chase them down and blow them up or are you like wow sucks for them they're just gonna drift in space forever i mean if if the expanse is anything to go by like you would just sort of let them suffocate slowly wow all right that's a that's a tough way to go i i'd show some mercy i'd blow them up
um depends on who it is anyway what do you think about that design decision that like you know keep in mind it's not these aren't boss fights they're just long fights they're they're multiple shots to take down an enemy there's not many options for maneuvering other than just kind of slowing your speed down to circle around your enemy and yes the lasers have a cooldown and the
torpedoes i don't know allegedly they work they never worked for me um there is two other upgrades you can get later on but you know this is this is the battle system and so uh in an eight by eight grid with 64 squares did you need you know and there's keep in mind it's not just like one enemy on a screen sometimes there's two sometimes there's three um did you need uh you know these to be long battles
i i think that the way that they designed the maps these had to have been long battles because you know if there's only eight enemies and it takes one shot to kill them i would prefer this be a smaller arena and maybe make it more action focused and because if it doesn't take a while to take them down like it should at least feel like a mini boss battle like each dog fight should require some level of engagement
beyond point and shoot uh otherwise it should have just been like everyone in a smaller sphere and you could just see everyone at once and i'm saying long battle but it's not right it's it's 30 seconds so max it's like two or three hits three or four hits and you know 30 seconds even would be a long time for the battle so it's not necessarily long it's just the idea that uh especially as you first start the game with you know the targeting and everything i just worry about the players who jump into this game
in 2023 and um you know first off it's a lot it's a lot of information to ask for someone to like dig into right people like to start their games just go right into them i'm sure that the numbers and letters on this grid mean something to some people but not everyone's going to get it right away so automatically you're starting in a situation where you're just kind of flying through space unaware and
that makes me think of star voyager another nes game we had a long time ago uh that was even more like dry and um and blank but here i just worry about how how do you keep people hooked you know and clearly the armories and the bases aren't enough for you know for like discovery uh the the hyperspace is cool right um probably the only reason why stars should be flying past you uh it looks very similar to what happens in star wars when uh they do what do they do there what is that i think it's
warped no no that's i think it's hyperspace hyperspace i you know what i'm the wrong person to ask yeah joe would know and it's a shame that he's looking for sam this episode
okay okay it's probably hyperspace forget that though forget everything actually about this whole 3d cockpit shooting section because once you take down every enemy on the screen all of a sudden the um you know the enemy base reveals itself and you can go to it and uh first off we never talked about this with the armories and the bases either but or the planets that you
survey but the cool thing about them is that you'd have to slow down you can't be going like sublight 7 near these planets because you'll just kind of fly past them so you have to like slow down locate them slowly approach them and then it like it sucks you in it's it's not really sucking you in but you lose control of your ship and it's to a certain point and you're landing right and now you
and now you're in the base or you know you're uh replenishing your weapon supply but let's there's nothing really interesting happening other than the time where after you've cleared all the enemies of the screen and then you go into the enemy base this is where the shmup section begins do we now start reviewing this game like it's a shmup i mean i guess because that's what it's that's what it wants to be right because i kind of question if the it seems like from my experience playing this game every single time i got the shmup section it feels like they were given the code for what a shmup is by another team but they themselves never played a shmup because this is gotta be one of the hardest shmups and the
tightest controls and the and the tightest controls in a bad way i'm saying like you cannot move this ship uh at your own will uh there's a there you one direction the d-pad to move a little faster the other direction to pull back that's not going to help you when enemies are always firing uh and and it's not even like the enemies are hard or anything it's just the the claustrophobic nature
of these bases claustrophobia is what i would describe it as because like you know in a normal shmup you got a whole wide open space to maneuver and there's a lot of enemies and they're traveling in patterns and they're shooting like slow projectiles but it doesn't matter because you have all this real estate and this is a very like it's like you said like they were given the code for
what a how to program a shmup but they had never played one so they didn't really know like that base philosophy of design for a shmup it's not about uh the like man like crowd control it's about going through tunnels that you can kind of excavate yourself um and it's more so don't touch the edges and like the enemies aren't so much like coming towards you and firing at you like it's more so based on obstacles like it's there's a lot of like missiles that are like laid like traps for you and um it yeah it's a very different vibe than most shmups in one of the only cut scenes for this game um you get a really cool 2d pixel art rendering of your spaceship the uh spaceship earth ship which
just just drives me crazy and it kind of looks like the again sorry i'm not the star wars nerd i thought i was i suppose but it kind of looks like a cross between the x-wing and that other ship that uh luke flies in the beginning of episode 5 on hoth you know uh it looks like a cross between those two ships it's like the y-wing or whatever yeah i really don't know but you know that's that's not important because i guess the point i was making is is that it seems like if they were inspired by anything it would be that whole like episode 4 ending where luke has to go into the death star trenches and quickly navigate through and hit that one little spot like that's the claustrophobic nature of of
this like entering the base and anything can kill you i just don't i just don't think it's actually that fun i think what we wind up getting is a a shmup that you die a lot in a complete change in game a game that probably people who were interested in the 3d shooter aspect of this game are now completely turned off because they don't like that shmups or these uh 2ds on rails limited control of spaceships like they probably wanted the complete opposite i feel like it's two different audiences and yet i somehow know that even the shmup audience is pissed by this game yeah it's also like it some parts just feel
unfair like um at a certain point and you have a button dedicated to firing behind you but usually there's so little clearance behind you and the edge of the screen that and you're not paying attention over there because you have so much other stuff to take it to take note of ahead of you they'll just come in shoot you once and you're dead like there's no and and then let's say you die three
times you got to go back to the the space exploration part and do that for another 20 minutes right which which by all comparisons to the shmup i'm not saying that the game itself is easy but compared to the shmup part of the level that is very easy to get through and so you're really just punished uh to play through the part that is you know that you could that you'll know you'll get to but then when you
get back to this there's no guarantee that you're gonna clear it it's not even like it's building up to anything cool though i swear like some of the boss fights are just like two circles it's just like oh that's that this is the big boss at the end it's two circles wait till the next boss it's two rectangles yeah it's very strange it's almost like uh they just sort of upscaled a couple normal enemies and made them like because you stop moving at least for the first boss it's just a couple
weird looking like look like uh like turrets or something and you just stop and you shoot them three or four times and they blow up and then that's the end of the level after this kind of gauntlet that they put you through that's like the level itself is kind of harder than the boss and yeah it's there's a lot of the head scratchers here yeah but surely you're very rewarded right like for oh yeah completing the
level like it's it's got to be a big reward what happens in the next level we've we've only been talking about the very first level of this game surely they're not all the same oh yeah you just do it again what yeah you just go back and you do it again seven times time with yeah i actually don't know if it's seven i think it might be six but like nevertheless the the point remains that uh
what we described is the gameplay loop it's not even like oh that was the unique thing that happens in the first level or whatever and now the next level like they're gonna introduce something new it's like nope the the game switches between this 3d space and this shmup game and the only difference from the one level to the next isn't even like it's not even aesthetically pleasing it's not like space looks different or something it's which i think would be funny if space looked different like you
traveled so far that outer space now looks different um not that that's a thing but it's just okay cool now this time we put more enemies on the screen you got even more enemies to clear and the shmup section it's even harder and there's new enemies in the shmup section to shoot yeah the shmup section at least looks different in each level but not by i mean it's not crazy right one question i have it's as hard as it gets right at the beginning like if you don't enjoy that you won't like the rest of
the game and that's maybe it takes maybe 15 minutes to get to the shmup section and so you'll know right away if you like this game or not in 15 minutes which is great because otherwise it might take you 40 hours to beat this game i do have a question for you as someone that probably did more research for this episode than i did sure is the ending like do you go to earth like do you know yeah so actually the ending is the only time that you get a boss that looks anything other than like circles and squares
and stuff like that but it's it's not um it's not particularly interesting um i i would love it to be some kind of cosmic entity or something but instead it's like this um nebula looking thing like with with um with two particles surrounding it very cool but afterwards you see the planet destroyed it says the people of okay which could have been earth but it's not it's the it's the planet you were going to and it says yeah earth the people of earth welcome you dot dot dot home again but it's destroyed i'm not certain that that was earth
i think that was the final obstacle to get to earth so then they don't show earth they don't show earth they show you text that says that you're this whole goddamn time you're trying to go to earth and they don't show you earth well you know it's not like we could possibly know what earth looks like you know a blue planet with green maybe in 1990 did we have a good idea of what the earth
looked like from space i'm joking you're right it was it was all here there'd be drag you know it's funny though sean even worse than all that forget the forget um the fact that it's a text that just tells you that you made it to earth rather than showing you a great visual of the earth what do you think happens immediately after that text does does the game start over yes
including your score wow like that's crazy right we've never seen that before usually the one carry over is your score but in this the score even resets so there's really no reason to play they just didn't think about anybody getting to the end maybe that was for the best
on the sequels and spinoff side there are none i figured but this is an imagineer game uh we have talked about them twice before now they did a boy in his blob that's cute uh but that was cute remember that wasn't really them right like that like that was the that was the developer listed on it but is that victor wasn't that david no no no it was david crane right oh david crane yeah it was like you remember it was like it was made by like a dude it's like branded on him um in in the in the main menu i was like that's crazy that he got his time his name in there we don't we don't see that too often but um also stealth atf was another uh game of theirs and that makes sense because that's the shooter uh so yeah not sure where a boy and his
blob came in but maybe they were just tasked at the last minute with helping david crane uh port it over to the nes or what happened yeah he had he had done them a solid in the past and i was like yeah we'll publish a game right well no because the publisher is different the imagineering they just know how to make games publisher for this one is actually acclaim oh yeah it was a claim wasn't it yeah so um acclaim is a company that like i see like we we know all this stuff about ljn and you know and their reputation right and maybe maybe it's not on them maybe it is on them it's definitely on them for publishing the bad games not saying they made them but like with acclaim
that's someone who i've like i remember seeing even as a child like on the n64 and the ps1 but like i don't know it like which game specifically they made and i don't know how i associate like this logo you know the i always associated acclaim with nba jam interesting okay which is a great game yeah i mean like that yeah that's a good one to think of them as if you want to think of them as a game i guess i'm saying like i'm very familiar with their logo and i know i've played many games of it on it just don't know how i feel about them as a publisher but i also do know that they have a reputation for you know being you know maybe kind of uh not being able to read the room in terms of
90s and early aughts marketing um and i think they were making some pretty bad games around then too so really i think the only great game that i know from acclaim is nba jam unless i'm just forgetting something and it's very possible you are because uh they've been a publisher for so long they had to publish at least one other good game yeah but is destination earth star one of those good games that they published sean we will answer that question on the essential games list
the shmup section isn't what removes this from consideration on the essential games list we didn't have an incredible game uh for like part one of this game and then all of a sudden when the shmup section comes in it's like i'm out that's gonna happen to a lot of people there are a lot of people who don't like shmups and they're gonna say that they're out as soon as that part's revealed but forget that it's not even that part that matters it's really that the uh the actual like
gameplay loop from the very beginning and the thing that you're going to do across all these different levels is pretty bare and stale and uh it's just about it's just about doing it it's not necessarily about the fun of doing it the numbers tell you where the enemies are you go to them you shoot them down they put up somewhat of a fight i really don't think they did but you know who i can't say if in level five all of a sudden they're fighting like um star wolf uh that's another star fox reference but you know maybe they are maybe they aren't it's just not it's not there right away
and so therefore it's like it's a chore right from the very beginning and then if you enjoyed all that it's taken away from you but even if you didn't like that part now you're into the shmup section well good luck brother because this is not an easy journey and we talked about it already so i just wanted to say that like overall this is a game not worthy of the essential games list it's not like oh well if they had just focused on the space stuff it would have been a great game or if they would have worked longer on the shmup things or followed a different format it's like no this this game
overall doesn't do it for me sean yeah i mean there are it it's it's a pleasant enough experience in the 3d like exploration segments and like i do like them some things i did with the controls to sort of add some versatility to the nes controller um but yeah everything that we've set up to this point between how slow everything is in that mode and how unchallenging it kind of is and how boring it can be when you're just traveling about looking for a fight and then the just the vibe of the the shmup portion that you just described i'm not going to describe it again it is not an essential game
all right so that's two no's we can only wonder what joe and sam would have said but uh when they come back they'll tell us yeah and we'll come back next week we have another game called rollerball sean any guesses um is that like uh is that like murderball what's murderball i don't know okay maybe i'm thinking of maybe i'm thinking of rollerball uh it's a sport where people get hurt a lot yeah the the one that um that famous movie was with the girls all playing in yeah what's that what is that rollerball oh you mean you mean like uh derby the roller derby yes roller derby there you go yeah which is clearly what it's not because they would have just called it roller derby but this is
the time i mean there is a movie called rollerball from the 70s i think it is what we're talking about great okay so this is just a late adaptation of that movie but on the nes yeah let's do it great okay so that's what that is look forward to that next week um everybody go watch that movie i guess i i've never seen it i'm gonna have to catch up on it too and then if you don't want to play rollerball or you're just tired of american games games released in north america might i interest you games released only in japan because that's what we do over at nostalgia bites um you can join us at patreon.com slash nostalgia spoiler alert it's five dollars spoiler alert it's worth it
um and the next game on the list for nostalgia bites is a game called cocorone and i am saying it like that but it could be cocoron i don't know cocorone i like cocorone you know that's oh marron you know you know that's what the italians are saying when i get the name wrong they're like oh no it's cocorone uh anyway that game platforming game where you like build your
character uh i've never heard of that before imagine if you got to like select mario's attributes uh before you started playing as him that's pretty cool does can i like can i make him like kind of like cool and mean well can make him mean bold of you to assume it's a him oh i thought you're talking about mario right right you could make mario in the game right that's a good idea build your character just like mario yeah but he's mean and he has a gun so it's m-rated shadow the mario brother mario the hedgehog the
