322 · The Last Starfighter
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The Last Starfighter is based on the 1984 movie of the same name. The hero must single-handedly pilot an extraordinarily powerful starfighter to destroy an enemy armada. The action takes place in outer space from a side-scrolling perspective where the ship always remains lined up in the middle of the screen but is able to turn forwards and backwards while accelerating and decelerating. The ship can also collapse into a slimmer configuration. Enemies come at you from all directions and in all formations. Shoot them as quickly as possible while also disabling the enemy fleet's starcruisers as best you can.
We expected a meta moment: a game called The Last Starfighter, based on a movie about a kid who masters a game called The Last Starfighter. Then we learned it's a reskin of Iridium, a Commodore 64 shooter unrelated to the movie, released in 1990 for a 1984 film. Mike, Sean and Joe were on this one, and Sean found out live.
What the game is
- Defender-style, with a twist. You fly back and forth across a small enemy base, shooting whatever is in your way, then land on the runway at the end and watch the base blow up. The movie ties amount to the box, the manual, and a 500,000 high score held by ALX.
- Landing is a puzzle you shouldn't have to solve. The manual mentions landing without saying how. GameFAQs did: approach left to right, at the slowest speed, and tap slow down once more over the runway. Once we knew, it worked every time; before that it nearly made us quit. You also have to destroy the base's turrets before "land now" appears, and dawdle and a hit squad arrives.
- Cheap deaths. Some things on the base are safe to fly over and others kill you, and the only clue is a drop shadow you can't read at speed. Turn around and enemies spawn right behind you.
- The bonus round. The fuel rod chamber is two flashing squares, one saying quit and one with a number, and you press A when the number shows. We called it the worst minigame on the console.
- Short. Fifteen levels. We were glad it didn't pad itself out, but that left us joking about paying $60 for 20 minutes.
Beyond the game
The best idea here is the small stage you circle like an X-Wing around a Star Destroyer, and Joe would love to see it lifted into a better game. The ending says "Good Zappin'" and then "turkey," which Sean was sure the movie never says. The movie's Death Blossom is missing entirely. Nick Eastridge's company programmed it alone in 6502 assembly for Mindscape on a tiny budget, which explains the bare-bones port. Two players alternate, which we joked is loyalty to there being one champion. Star Raiders 2 on Atari 8-bit computers is the game that actually uses the movie.
The bottom line
Skip it. Nobody voted it onto the Essential Games List, and that settled it. Sean liked the odd shmup structure but called this more a fun story about the movie and its YouTube clips than a great game. Joe said he hated it.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- You’re the best there is - The #1 Arcade Champion
- NES Longplay
- Manual
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- The Last Starfighter movie from 1984. A teenager recruited by an alien defense force to fight in an interstellar war. Tron like CGI
- The high score to beat is 500,000 by ALX. This is notable, as the main character in the movie, played by Lance Guest, is named Alex Rogan.
- Star Raiders II is a video game released in 1986 for the Atari 8-bit family as a sequel to 1979's Star Raiders, which was the killer app for the Atari computers. The game was originally developed as part of a tie-in with the movie The Last Starfighter, which featured an arcade game of the same name as part of its plotline.
- Uridium on the Commodore 64
- This NES game is a port of that
- Mindscape slapped a new title on this and did the same with Conan which was a port of a computer game called Myth: History in the Making,
- The Last Starfighter movie from 1984. A teenager recruited by an alien defense force to fight in an interstellar war. Tron like CGI
- Plot
- Gameplay
- Destroy bases at your own leisure. Get to the end of a level and decide to land your ship when you’re satisfied. Your scores will tally and you’ll see a cool annihilation sequence of the base.
- Playing with speed
- Landing
- To land, approach that VERY LAST landing strip from the left side so you are
- flying to the right. The second you fly over that last strip with the arrows,
- hold left to slow down and instead of turning back to the left you will
- actually land, as the ship lowers itself down to the runway. You CANNOT land by
- flying in from the right side. Once you actually achieve this it will seem
- easy, but it actually seems really complicated to pull off.
- THE FUEL ROD CHAMBER
- 2 squares flashing alternately. One has the word QUIT in it while the other has a number. The number is a bonus score. You have to press A or B while the number flashes.If you press it while the word QUIT is flashing, the bonus level is over. If
- you press the button while the score is flashing, you move up to the next
- level
- Annihilation
- Why is it auto-pilot if you can control the ship?
- Only 15 levels, with such little consequence for ending a level early this should be an infinite loop
- The ending says GOOD ZAPPIN…TURKEY
- No death blossom
- 2 player is not simultaneous
- Annihilation
- Development
- Mindscape contracted a company called Eastridge Technology, run by a single guy, Nick Eastridge, to do a bunch of NES games for them (Mad Max, Paperboy, Conan, just to name a few). However, Mindscape gave Nick such short time limits to get the game done, and single-handedly programming a Nintendo NES game in 6502 assembly language is not an easy task.
- Sequels and spinoffs
- Uridium was followed by Uridium+ (a modified version containing new levels), and Uridium 2 on the Amiga platform.
- EGL
- Next week - The Mafat Conspiracy: Golgo 13
- NEStalgia Byte - Konami Wai Wai World
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
The Last Starfighter, you're the best there is, the number one arcade champion.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. And the reference there to you being the best there is and you being the number one arcade champion are one of the few ways that you can know that this NES game, The Last Starfighter, is a video game port of a 1984 movie that also goes by the same name.
It's a port. It's a port of a movie. You know what I'm saying? It's like, enough time has passed. It's just enough time has passed. It's not like it's like in the release window of like, I've got to promote the movie, release a game. It's like 1984. Now we're in 1990. And we're just getting the game based on this movie that like, look, I'm sorry. I know our audience probably likes this movie. I think we've done this before. Did it come out alongside the movie and it just was ported to the NES now or?
Okay, but that's where things are. Things are going to get even more confusing for you, Joe, because I don't know how long we go with this. But like the arcade game that this game is based on has nothing to do with The Last Starfighter, the movie. It's an arcade game called Iridium. Oh, right. So, so that's that. So they just took that game and said, let's base. Let's now just say this is based off of that movie. That yeah, that movie from 1984 that we are going to release in 1990. Let's just say it's that not change anything about the game. We don't have to worry about that.
But what we can do is we can put in on the back of the box and in the manual a bunch of references to the last Starfighter movie. You guys are blowing my mind right now because here I was prepared to talk about like, wow, isn't it isn't meta? Like we got our first like meta game here because like the movies about playing a game called The Last Starfighter and now we're playing a game called The Last Starfighter based off a movie called The Last Starfighter. That's about a game called The Last Starfighter. And you're telling me that this is like a reskin. It's just it's a blatant reskin, too. It's not even the game is called Iridium. It was on the Commodore 64. It was not on the arcades.
So it's not even an arcade game. So the whole like you're the number one arcade champion. Now prove it in the movie. It's like now prove it an actual interstellar war. But in the in this game, it's like, OK, now prove it on the Commodore 64. Now prove it on the NES. It's like this is just, you know, I guess it's not like a direct port. But yeah, they didn't make a game based on The Last Starfighter at all. This is just a ripoff of that Iridium game on Commodore 64.
Well, that's really disappointing. And here I was. I was going to start talking about the movie because that's what I want to do. Well, I want you to talk about the movie because it is a cool movie. It has, you know, it's got that Tron like CGI.
And it is a it is a unique plot, as you mentioned, of a kid who's so good at the video game. And then the video game turns out to be like a training course, a combat simulation, if you will, going back to image fight, which we recorded two weeks ago. Maybe that's what was happening. This is like that universe is equivalent of image fight is that you play video games to then find out if you're good enough for interstellar war between a bunch of alien races.
And Sean, for your actual review of the movie, can you sum it up fast for us? Well, I was going to ask if you guys have seen it because I haven't. All I did was watch YouTube. I think it's movie clips is the is the is the channel. I was the only way we're supposed to watch movies now. You're right. Like David Lynch said, just watch 10 movie clips on your phone on YouTube and you'll be fine. Tic Tac generation. That is how people watch the movies. And you can't convince me otherwise.
But, you know, from those 10 clips seems seems pretty fun. You know, like there's there's laughs. There's there's tense moments. There's there's CG like from like an FMV in a in a PS1 game.
It's got everything. But hear me out on the CG for a second, because I compared it to Tron, which. I'm sure the same studios did it because there was only like one studio at the time. That had that computer. CG, right? Yeah, exactly. But and I'm being I'm being maybe too nice here. But from what I saw of the movie, I actually would compare it to like Toy Story one in terms of like it holds up fine because you're aware of how basic it is. Right. Like when you look at Toy Story one, you look at Toy Story three.
You're like, wow, this CG stuff really came a long way. But it's not like Toy Story one's unwatchable. Just like the I don't know, the spaceships in the last Starfighter movie were like cute for the video game. Right. You buy into it the same way when you play eight bit games. You're not like, sure. I can't even look at this. How does it compare to and nobody in our audience is going to know this because we're younger than most of our audience. But how does it compare to Spy Kids 3D?
It's better. Yeah, it's better than that. Good. But one thing that I will say is that Toy Story holds up because it was always a cartoon. Like the style is cartoonish. It is being a 3D cartoon. Whereas anything like this, it like you can't really compare it because it's trying to be a live action movie that's trying to sell itself as having these huge actions action sequences that's supposed to have some verisimilitude.
And it doesn't because it doesn't like sell itself anymore. So that's why that's why Toy Story holds up in this moment. Got it. The there is one other reference to the game that's actually into one of the reference to the movie inside the game. And that is the high score in the game is 500,000 points by a L X. And that is the main character's name in the movie, Alex.
So they're they at least went a little bit beyond just saying like, hey, if we just rename this game, right? Like, I don't know. That's a genius idea. Why didn't they just find a dinosaur video game on Commodore 64 and just start calling, you know, like, well, Jurassic Park wasn't out yet. So they haven't had that. The land before time. No, I can go back in. Maybe they could have gotten ahead of Spielberg and released Jurassic Park in the game before the movie. Yeah, I can go back in time and do this. I'm creating a little time loop. Or, yeah, they could have.
No, there's actually no examples that I can make because I was born in 1992. There's no examples. No, I just don't know any movies that came out before 1992. So I'm just not suitable for this. I don't know any of them. That's true. Well, I didn't know that this was a movie until, you know, this week.
And I'll say what I this is one of the rare times I looked at the cover of this game and I was like, I think this deserves a manual read because it's like this rare. And then there's like a regular dude and like a flannel, just like contemporary human.
And then there's like, you know, I don't remember exactly, but like space design behind them or whatever. So I read the manual and without knowing it's a movie and even with knowing it's a movie, it's a very interesting story introduction where the first sentence of the introduction to the video game Starfighter is, ah, yes, the introduction to your favorite video game Starfighter. Very weird in the first place. But then it's like, then it goes in like, you've played it so long and it talks about how much you've played it in the arcade and how you had the high score.
And it says, well, prepare yourself for a surprise because it's not a video game. It's a training simulator from this, I'm assuming this is the plot of the movie, from this alien on this other planet. And they, you've got the best score. So they're recruiting you to come and save them. Joe. And it treats the whole thing like that. And not knowing it was a movie, I thought it was clever.
Wouldn't it be funny if that wasn't the plot of the movie at all? Yeah. This is just a plot of whatever this game was originally called. Yeah. Or they just got the early script and they had to start making the game back then. But they actually, in the seven years it took them to get it from script to release of the NES version of the game, they still used the old script and not the new one. Yeah. It's the HBO Game of Thrones did.
Oh, yeah. The game. We have to talk about the game. Yeah. I was going to say, to get into the game, if you don't mind, forget what you know about the last Starfighter movie. Because it doesn't matter here. Instead, you are playing, as I mentioned, a game called Iridium. But now it's called The Last Starfighter. In it, it's like a space shooter game that's very much like Defender, which was an arcade game and very popular in the Atari 2600, in which you shoot other enemy ships and can move back and forth across the enemy base to shoot down these ships. At your own leisure.
The goal is to, you know, basically land your ship on the enemy base after you're content with the number of ships you've destroyed. And then you get a cool, like, annihilation sequence of the base. So, a couple things here. And I'm going to work at them one at a time because this will help stretch out the episode to give us enough to talk about. The first thing being, okay, so the mission is to kind of, like, destroy these alien bases.
So, if you can just do that just by landing your ship, is there any incentive to fight any of the opposing ships? The enemies, if you will? Well, to not die being one. But also, I thought, and I could just totally be wrong because I was very confused about certain points of this game. But I thought that you had to take out, like, enough of their, like, turret defenses before you could land, right?
That's only if you get to an area, because technically you can land on any of those ones that look like a landing strip. But at the end of every level, there's always just a landing strip that has no turrets on it. Yeah, but don't you have to wait? Do you not have to wait until it says there's that blinking land? I don't think you have to wait. I think that's actually just a warning. I did have problems with landing in this game, and I don't know.
Like, that's where I'm kind of confused, too, because I did the same. I did this very funny thing that I've been doing recently, and that's not read the manual for the game. So, it took me some time to really understand what you're supposed to do. I realized that in order to end the level, you have to end the level yourself by landing. But I think, like, you can only land at that last runway. But even then, you have to, like, do some weird button combination to do it.
And go ahead. Joe is right. I can jump in. Joe is right. No, I'm not even arguing. I'm just saying that, like, I agree so much. Well, I'm arguing. I read the manual, and it explains how to land, and it's just wrong. Like, it's just, like, I don't know. I still don't know how to land. I've done it. I get it sometimes, once in a while. It doesn't say anything about buttons. It just says, like, you have to fly from the beginning of the major runway to the end of it, and you'll land automatically, to my understanding.
And, like, that happened to me sometimes. But most of the time, I just fly right by. Don't move too fast. Don't get into the landing yet, because that's, like, our Top Gun section of this game. So landing is always an issue, apparently, in NES games.
Just to clear it up for the confused listener at home who either knows this game or doesn't know it, Joe was correct, and there is a landing strip at the end of each level. I was also correct, Mike. I was also there. I said it. You said that, but here's the twist. You do have to destroy, specifically, not the enemy ships, but specifically the defense forces of the alien base. So, like, the landed planes?
Or, yeah, or the turrets, as Joe was describing them. You have to destroy those things that are actually on the base itself in order to get the land now thing. To show you how not difficult that is, at least for the early stages, that is just something that will happen to you as you progress through the stage. Like, you're going from left to right, and you have the ability to backtrack. So it's not like you can be like, oh, shoot, I missed too many.
Like, you've got to restart the level. It's like you have the ability to just turn around and shoot the turret that you missed. That I didn't even notice that that was the mechanic, and I was still able to get to the land now sequence at the end of all of these. It is something that they at least make it so that you have to land at the end of your scroll to the right sequence, so you at least have to see the entirety of the base before you can choose to exit the level. I just feel like it is a little strange that it isn't clear all enemies in order to get the land now sequence. The enemies just always will just spawn infinity.
That's where I'm having some trouble understanding what you're saying here, because I'm pretty sure that the land now thing, it's on a timer. It is not. It's not? It's not. It's those turrets on the base itself, like those things that shoot at you. Sure, sure, sure. Okay. But no, there are other things on the base that might shoot things or launch projectiles too, like such as ships, and those don't matter. You don't have to kill those ships that it launches out. You just have to kill the actual destructible turrets that are on the base itself.
Okay, okay. Because there were times that I took too long landing now, as one would say in this game. And then they just send a hit squad that has perfect accuracy, and they will destroy you if you haven't landed now. So I had some trouble. I know it was easy for you. I never said it was easy. I said as far as the early stages go, because that's about all I could tolerate. Not a spoiler for my Essential Games list vote at all, I promise.
The real problem is, as Sean was mentioning, that at a certain point, right, the enemy ships go from like, they're just scrolling in your way, right? Like, they just happen to be in your way, and you can shoot at them, you can dodge them, you can do whatever, because again, it's just points. So you choose what to do here. But there is a point where all of a sudden, the enemy ships get a little too aggressive.
They get to, like, home on you. They get very, they speed up very fast. And landing is really, like, something that you might as well do soon. And maybe the pro player is the one who sticks around to keep picking off these ships to score high points. But the rest of us are just concerned with moving on to the next level. Would you agree with that, Sean? I suppose so. My problem with it was that I actually really like the idea of this shmup where you are kind of just backtracking on, like, this very small.
It gives the feeling that you're, like, in, like, a TIE fighter or an X-Wing taking on, like, a, taking on, you know, a giant Star Destroyer or something. Where, like, you're just kind of, like, circling around the ship. It's in 2D, so you're not really circling around. But you're moving back and forth around it. It kind of has this cool feel to it.
What bothered me was that it takes a second to turn your ship around. And I feel like just pretty much every time I turn my ship around, enemies, like, five enemies spawn behind me. When it's too late for me to shoot them and it would take me too long to turn around and they just immediately shoot me. Like, and maybe I'm just, I got to get better at dodging. But it just felt like even when I'm trying to land, it's, like, always, there's two, there's so much that feels about, like, just management of, like, these enemies that felt a little unfair. I mean, I agree to some extent.
I think a lot of it is, okay, so you get, like, some iframes when you're turning around. Like, you can also do, like, a spinorama. And I'm pretty sure you get some invincibility there, too.
But I will say that I think if the level is going to be this small, because we're used to these shmups that just, they're endlessly scrolling. And you don't, you never know when it's going to end. And it all starts to blur together that, like, it's this small of a game, of a game space that, like, it's got to have some extra challenge to it. And I think that, like, the challenge that's added to the level itself is kind of countered by the fact that you have some defensive measures. Like, you can dodge things if you're, like, if you're moving slow enough already, then you can kind of use that turnaround animation in your favor.
But I don't know. I think there's a balance there that it's sort of hitting. Yeah, I'll also admit that I, that the thing you mentioned about kind of the barrel roll you can do, I almost didn't utilize that at all. And I probably should have. I only utilized it when I was trying to land. So I know what you mean. Oh, gotcha. Yeah.
But yeah, I was just feeling like, enemies, since they spawn kind of at random, it was just like, as soon as I turn around and my backs turn, enemies just spawn immediately behind me and shoot me. Where it's like, well, like, if I knew they were there, I wouldn't have turned around, but they weren't there. They appeared there as soon as I turned around, and that bothered me. And one thing that I want to point out, just going back to the movie for a second here, it's funny that this game has such a, you know, for a shmup, non-standard structure.
Because the plot of this movie, and there are lines and dialogue conversations in this movie that literally codify a shmup. Like, they actually talk about, like, we've always sort of called out, like, why the hell are they just sending this one guy to take off, to take out this entire air force or this entire armada? Like, can't they send him some more resources?
And then, in the plot of this movie, they actually do that. And then when they make a game out of the movie about games, they make it not that. Sorry. I just think that that's super weird, and so many missed opportunities here. Well, just remember, because that's because they made a game that wasn't about a movie, and then somebody said, I'll pay you money to just port this. They could have licensed any game to rename. Yes, I totally agree. Why couldn't Image Fight be the last Starfighter? That's true. I hear you loud and clear. And I'm only picking on Image Fight because we just recorded that episode two weeks ago, so no biggie there.
Just one other thing. The game really wants you to believe that the ability to control your speed is important. It is something that you do have power over by choosing how fast you want to go. And I guess it matters most in the small detail that we haven't talked about yet for the base that there are things on the base. And it is a little unclear what those things are, but there are things on the base that you can fly over, and then there are others that you can't fly over and you will crash into.
And I don't know if anybody else was able to figure out the secret sauce that was like, oh, when the graphic looks like this, you'll crash into it. But I certainly couldn't, and it led to a lot of surprise deaths. Yeah. So I guess I should have been playing slower? Okay, so the whole speed thing, basically you should be playing as close to standard shmup scrolling speed as you can until there's like a thing that kind of looks like a pickup. So you might fly into it thinking you'll get a power up, but then you just explode.
Otherwise, if you go any faster, you will just run into the things that Mike was talking about. The only thing I could tell is that these things that you can hit and blow up, like they have like a drop shadow. That's the only way that I could tell, but that is not legible at the speed you're usually going at.
To move on to the landing sequence, something you guys were trying to jump the gun on and I had to reel you back in for a second. Landing is something that the manual tries to describe and then you realize, and I think Joe was coming to the same conclusion, Sean having not read the manual wouldn't know this, that it doesn't actually tell you. I read that part of the manual after the fact. Okay, got it, got it. That's like ASMR right there. It doesn't actually tell you how to land, it just mentions landing.
It says like hold back. Right, right. And it's like, okay, but I could really use like an input now if I was a manual, right? I'd be talking about the controls. And so to land, for those of you who maybe played this game and still haven't figured it out, you have to approach the landing strip at the end of each level so that when you are scrolling from left to right, it doesn't work if you go right to left, believe it or not. If you turn your ship around, you have to go back to before the landing strip and then turn it around again.
Because whether or not you're blowing this place up, you still have to follow the air traffic control laws. Yeah, absolutely. Otherwise, they just won't let you land, right? No, who knows what the explanation is. You're cleared to land if you're coming in this way, even if you're blowing us up.
Right. So basically, you have to be at the slowest speed as you're approaching this landing strip. And then, and only then, if you're on the slowest speed, do you, as you're hovering over the landing strip, you press to slow down one last time. And that is what causes it to land. You cannot be at a faster speed than slow, than slowest, and just, and just keep spamming the left button enough, or, yeah, it would be the left button because you're facing the left side.
But did you ever try that and feel like, because I, I, I never was maybe specifically trying to be at the slowest, like, thinking, like, this is what I have to do. But I was at the slowest speed, I thought, for a lot of the time because I was just trying to figure it out. And then I would hit the, like, slow down button and it would just turn me around.
And, no, it works every time, in my opinion, once you know that. And I only know that because of game FAQs. I had to read it. I literally couldn't wrap my head around it. At least 60% of the time it works all the time. Is there, is there, like a, I mean, how lined up with the runway? Does your shadow have to be lined up or does your ship have to be lined up? Your ship has to be lined up. The shadow? Yeah, it's the ship. The ship. It is the ship. Okay. Because, you know, intuitively I would think the shadow. But then, but I tried both, too. And it happened sometimes and other times it didn't. And I could just never, I could just never nail it down.
Yeah, it was tough. It was, it was real tough, guys. No, I do agree that it's, it's one of those things that's almost impossible until you find out the secret sauce. Like, there, there was a moment for me where I was actually just thinking, like, I'm not going to be able to play this game. Like, it's not going to work. So I went to game FAQs, read that, and just immediately landed every single time afterwards. Not bragging again, but it, that's how it went. And, and, and the funny thing is, is that I proceeded to read the rest of the game FAQ. The only FAQ written about this game on the NES.
And the rest of the FAQ just trashes the game so hard. Like, unnecessarily, just like, can't believe that this person who wrote this simultaneously wrote this wall of text. And continues to berate the game the entire time.
Yeah, I, for some reason, did not have the mental clarity to go to game FAQs. I just thought, like, in this day and age, where every game has something written about it. I just googled, like, how do you land in the last Starfighter NES?
And was surprised to find nothing really there. Yeah. So. There's nothing about anything about the last Starfighter on the NES. I am surprised about, and we've seen this a lot recently, where, like, are these games rare? Are they worth anything? Like, did people just not play a lot of NES games in the 1990s? It's surprising how little information I'm able to find about some of these games. We've, you know, we've heard of the movie, or at least watched the clips on YouTube. And now it's like, but nobody's talking about the NES game? That's weird. I sense a conspiracy.
It's a cover-up. Once you land the ship on the base, though, you're taken to a bonus game, or call it a game, if you will. It's a bonus screen that the manual refers to as the fuel rod chamber. So I guess you're doing something in there to get enough fuel to go on to the next base. But all it really is is just two squares flashing, one after the other. One has the word quit on it. The other has a number. That number is going to be the amount of points that the game gives you. And you have to press the A button while hopefully the number is flashing, or else you press the quit button, and that just means the bonus level's over.
And if you get the number, then it moves you on to the next stage in the pyramid of the fuel rod chamber. The only guy knows that it's dumb. Thank you, please. You don't need to do it. So thankful you saved me. Yeah. This is the worst excuse for an interactive minigame that I think that we've seen on this console. It's literally just like, try to match the clock speed of this, and that's it. It takes no... It takes...
I'm done talking about it. Yeah, by the time you get to the highest up one, I mean, the highest one, it's got to be pure luck. I just don't believe someone could be fast enough to actually get that on skill. No. There's only 15 levels, but they do get a lot more challenging as it goes on, especially with the way that the enemy ships behave. You will die a lot. You will run into things on the base a lot. You will just succumb to the surprise attacks that Joe was referring to, where it's like, well, it's one thing to be able to deal with the ships as they're on screen, but it's another thing when they just appear suddenly, and you just can't move fast enough to get away from them.
Yeah. But with only 15 levels, right, like, is it... And you can leave whenever, right? Like, there's no consequence for leaving early. So assuming that you just get to, successfully get to the end of each stage and know to slow down and know how to land, you could theoretically play this game very fast and beat it very fast if you knew where the ships were spawning out of. Is it like, shouldn't it just been an infinite loop? Why only 15 levels? Well, hold on. I've found that we aren't very keen on a game stretching itself out just by repeating itself. So I almost, like, thank it for its mercy that it's not doing that. I'm glad I spent $60 for 20 minutes of gameplay.
When you said you can just leave at any time, I actually thought you meant that, like, you can just get up, put the controller down, and walk away from this game at any time. Just leave. Because that's your first thought. You see what I'm saying? That's your first thought.
But you also, not to subvert the question you asked, but I kind of agree with Sean. I just think, like, make more game if you're going to make more game. Otherwise, like, I'll be done. But you also mentioned that you will crash into the ship or to, like, parts of the ship often. Did anyone else feel like that was a lot of those things are, like, hard to tell what's 3D and what's not? Oh, yeah. I crashed into a lot of things I thought were part of the background.
There's definitely, like, I was describing it earlier. There's, like, a drop shadow that'll show you what is crash-into-able and what isn't. But it definitely blends into the stage. Right. So, it's not, like, if they had just given it a contrast in color, then, holy shit, you solved cancer. Like, that's all you gotta do. But they didn't do that. So, you have to kind of fly slow.
And it's silly. At the end of the game, as you scroll, well, before I get to the end of the game, actually, there's a different scrolling thing I wanted to talk about. And that is those base destruction sequences. After the fuel rod chamber bonus game, and after you land, you see the annihilation of the alien ship level that you were just on.
But it's kind of autopilot. Like, you can steer the ship from left to right, but you can't die in the explosion, right? Like, you just watch it blow up. It's there to be cool. But, like, why is it on autopilot if you can control the ship, right? Like, and you're just watching the whole level blow up again. It's like, shouldn't there be one last, like, challenge here? I don't know if I would have liked that in the actual game, but, like, thinking about substance. Like, isn't this just weird that, like, at the end of every level, you just kind of watch the same cutscene over and over again where the level destroys itself?
I thought it was, I thought it was, I was thinking of it the opposite way. I was like, oh, okay, there's this cutscene, and as an added perk, they let you have, maintain control of the ship during the cutscene. Rather than, like, this is a level, but nothing can happen to you. So I guess it just depends on the way you look at it. Yeah, had the levels not started with you needing to get into, like, the safety corral zone to be able to control the ship, you know what I'm talking about? There's, like, those five beach balls that, like, yeah.
Right, once you enter that, you have control of your ship. But had that not been there, I would have thought that they just didn't know how to program a cutscene and that you could just control the ship at all times. That was an immediate introduction to frustration. I don't know what it is, but that, not having control of the ship for those first few seconds, like, immediately made me kind of upset.
And I don't know if that's just, like, my reptile brain that's been getting worse and worse and just getting rotted by video games, but that just didn't feel right. Did it felt right to you guys? No. Well, I don't think I had the same frustration, but I was, like, checking my controller, making sure I was, like, plugged in, and, like, you know, I was a little concerned for a moment. I don't think this is related to the movie, but after you've finished the final level, you scroll past a bunch of text that says, Good Zappin', dot, dot, dot, turkey. Yes. What the heck is that?
Sean, do they ever say Good Zappin' Turkey in the movie? As the definitive Last Starfighter fan here, I'm almost positive they didn't say Turkey once, and I did watch the scene where, you know, his alien friends meet his human friends, and, like, they say, How do you do? And I do well. How do you do? And not once did they say Turkey. It's just interesting, because I also believe it's in the original Iridium game as well, so almost confirms that it wouldn't be from the movie, but why not just change it to be in the movie?
And while we're talking about things that you could change to be in the movie, Sean, as the biggest Last Starfighter fan in the room, were you surprised that there— Yeah, in the world, I should say. Were you surprised that there was no, like, after you kill a certain amount of enemies, press A and B at the same time to launch the Death Blossom?
Yes. I was gonna mention the Death Blossom, because that was one of the scenes on movie clips on YouTube. Uh, but the thing is that I only watched all the movie clips on YouTube after I played the game. Uh, like, several hours, like, maybe 24 hours between playing the game and watching the definitive movie clips, this makes you a fan, videos. Uh, so I only learned about the Death Blossom after the fact. But if you're asking me after the fact, yeah, I think it's a missed opportunity. That's, like, the biggest scene in the movie, if movie clips is to be believed.
Well, it's definitely the coolest, because, you know, there's a lot of talk about the Death Blossom, and then to actually see it, uh, you know, again, I'm not saying that the graphics look, uh, great compared to the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, but it sold me. I was like, hey, that looks great, you know? Like, I'm buying it. He's doing all that. And maybe it's because they leaned into the video game feel of it all, especially the, you know, 80s arcade aesthetic of it. But, um, I buy that, and I'm really surprised to see that they couldn't even just deliver a, you know, Death Blossom end sequence at the end of level 15. Just something. Are we sure that this isn't just a ROM hack?
No, but isn't it really? Like, I mean, I, you know, I know you're joking, but, like, isn't it kind of? Like, didn't they just say, like, hey, we're just gonna pay to take the same game and just rename it? Like, that's all. All they really had to do was just design the menu. Yeah, you're right. To have the name. Obviously, they had to do a lot more to also program it over to assembly. And speaking of, on the development side, Mindscape, who was the one who came up with this whole idea of, like, well, let's get the last Starfighter onto NES by taking this game called Iridium on Commodore 64. They contracted a company called Eastridge Technology, which sounds professional, but was really just run by this guy, Nick Eastridge.
And he winds up doing a bunch of games for Mindscape. But one of the games, this one, the last Starfighter, they gave him, like, a very small amount of time and basically a budget so that he could not hire anybody else. He had to single-handedly program the game in 6502 assembly language. And I think that's why we wind up with, like, just a straight bare-bones port with no last Starfighter references into it. So I'm gonna give Eastridge Technology the benefit of the doubt here and blame it all on Mindscape, the financers.
It's always who financed it that's in trouble. Well, here's where I disagree, because now you're making me think that, like, Mindscape didn't even know that he plagiarized video game and that he did so under duress. So I'm not saying he's evil, but I think that, like, it's a situation where, like, he didn't study for a test. So you find a way to cheat, and then he cheated and got away with it.
And, like, the people that made Iridium didn't think that their work was gonna be turned into the last Starfighter, and then it did. Like, I think that's how it went down. And there is a two-player mode in the last Starfighter, but it is not simultaneous. It is one after the other. And I guess they were just trying to stay true to the movie on that regard, right? There aren't two people that are the number one at arcades.
There's just one dude, and his name is Alex. So they at least stayed faithful to the movie by not including a two-player simultaneous game. That was their reasoning, too. They were like, we had it all programmed, but then we were like, you know, this is just too disingenuous to what the movie was. On the sequels and spinoff side, first, obviously, there's Iridium on the Commodore 64. Go check that out, because it actually gets a lot of high praise. But maybe that's just because it's a game on the Commodore 64. Like, how often do you hear about must-play games on the C64? And how often do you hear called the C64, right? It's right there next to the N64.
Much less powerful, of course. And another thing to note is that Mindscape will do this again. They'll do the whole, like, oh, let's just take a C64 game and port it over to the NES and use an established franchise. When we play whatever their Conan game is, it's going to be... Oh, no. Yeah, it's going to... And that's not Conan O'Brien. That's Conan the Last Warrior.
I thought they were one and the same. You know, I thought so, too, for a long time. But that game is based on a port of a computer game called Myth, History in the Making. And they're going to turn that into a Conan game instead. After that, we have a game called Star Raiders 2, which was on the Atari 8-bit family. And if you're wondering what the Atari 8-bit family is, it's a bunch of computers again. So there's a lot of, like, uncomfortable computer consoles. Do you even call them consoles at that point? No. Computers. Platforms. Yeah. Platforms that we don't really know about. We're out of our element here a little bit. But apparently they were making a big splash so much that people were like, get these games on the NES. But Star Raiders 2 is...
The game was originally developed as a tie-in with the movie The Last Starfighter. And so that is the game. Star Raiders 2 is the closest to The Last Starfighter, the movie. We're going to get an adaptation of The Last Starfighter on the NES. And it's not even going to be called The Last Starfighter? Well, no. Star Raiders 2 is only on that Atari 8-bit family computers. Oh, sorry. Atari. I'm just saying, if you want the video game that actually works The Last Starfighter into more than just the manual and the box,
you play Star Raiders 2. That's crazy. Which is confusing because Star Raiders 2 is not something that you would... You know, that's like playing Duke Nukem and finding out, like, you know, oh, actually, that's the Terminator, right? Like, no. Like, you know, you don't do that. It's Duke Nukem 3 and it's actually Terminator 1. Right, right. It just doesn't happen.
And then lastly, for Iridium, again, this is so confusing because none of these games are actually sequels and spinoffs to this last Starfighter NES game we played. But Iridium was followed by a game called Iridium Plus, which was just basically new levels of the same exact game, which was a very popular thing to do on computer systems. And then Iridium 2 finally came out on the Amiga, which has, like, something crazy, like 3,600 games on it. So if you ever go through that library, we won't be doing a podcast on it. But if you ever go through that library... Never say never. ...know that if you did it... Yeah, if you did it alphabetically, you'd be playing Iridium 2 pretty near the end of your thousand-year journey.
So you're only doing three games a year? Yeah, yeah, that's right. You heard me. I know what I said. Double checking. Yep. I know what I said, and I know how I'll vote on the Essential Games list.
I don't know what it is now, 320 episodes into the podcast, that, like, I can read a game in about five minutes. But I knew five minutes into this one that I wasn't putting it on the Essential Games list. And yes, I did spend more than five minutes with it, but it never improved from the first five, which leads me to believe that I shouldn't have wasted any more time than the five minutes I wasted on it. And you certainly shouldn't waste any more time if you listen to the entirety of this episode by checking it out. Sean? Yeah, this is such a bizarre game.
I mean, I guess mostly from the background. And I'm glad that you guys got my live reaction knowing, just finding out that this was never supposed to tie in to The Last Starfighter. But it's such a weird game that, like, I have to give it credit, at least like Iridium, that it's like a shmup, but there are so many big changes from the standard formula that, like, that's cool, but, like, you know, it wasn't all that fun. So I would have given The Last Starfighter all that credit, but I can't. It wasn't them. But regardless, it's not good enough to call it Essential.
It's more a fun story about the movie and movie clips on YouTube than it is a great video game. So, yeah, not Essential. Joe? Oh, I hated it. I thought that the one thing that I found interesting about it was the ability to move back and forth on this kind of small stage.
As a shmup, I think that's an interesting idea. And I would love to see somebody airlift that idea out of this game and put it into another game that felt a little better. And, you know, maybe there are redeeming qualities about it, and I'm just bad at this game, and, you know, I didn't like the way that it kind of seemed to cheese me in the sense that, like, it just spawns enemies in places that I'm already, like, flying away from and things like that. But overall, certainly not Essential. All right, that's three no's. Next week, we will be playing The Moffat Conspiracy Golgo 13.
Oh, yeah. Sound familiar, boys? Let's go. It's been a minute, right? I don't remember anything about that game. You liked it? It's, like, one of the few that I actually do remember a lot about because it was so interesting to me. It's got cut scenes. Yeah, and there's, like, ten different, like, types of gameplay in it. Yeah. You know, there's, like, a shmup level. There's, like, you know, a run and gun. And then there's, like, 3D stages.
Yeah, there was, like, a whole minute where they just had, like, a sniper minigame in there. Yeah. You know, they were just like, hey, now you're a sniper. Golgo 13 was episode 115, recorded in, let's check notes, April 17th, 2020. Wow. And Golgo 13, the Moffat conspiracy. Yeah, is May 3rd, 2024. So that's kind of cool. Time is a flat circle. I am going to go watch David Lynch's Blue Velvet movie clips on YouTube now, just the way he intended. I am going to go watch David Lynch's Blue Velvet movie clips on YouTube.
