One area in which Thunder Spirits makes some attempt to excel beyond its muses is in the detailed background graphics. It's a moment that's satisfying, if all too brief. After destroying much of this behemoth's exterior weaponry, your ship descends into a hatch to blow up its core from the inside. Thunder Spirits even includes a "giant warship" level, originally made famous by R-Type's Level 3. There is a stage that scrolls diagonally through the ruins of space junk, which is unusual, yet has the same feel as the Moai stage of Gradius III. It happens without warning, and almost seems out-of-place when it does. While the mechanical bases look like the ones from the Gradius games, there are a few sections where the screen will suddenly scroll backwards as you're forced to maneuver the ship around narrow passageways. The level design of Thunder Spirits is typical space shooter fare, and only occasionally offers something you may not have seen before. When fully upgraded, you're a wall of firepower that's difficult for enemies to penetrate. Each weapon has advantages and disadvantages, but they're all similarly overpowered. Even the default weapons the ship always has aren't too shabby and can be upgraded. If you still have any, you can just switch to a different one. You lose the weapon you were currently using, but you can accumulate up to five. This is common to many shooters of the era, but the curious aspect of Thunder Spirits is that you're not a complete sitting duck if your ship is destroyed. The key to winning in Thunder Spirits is to get your ship fully powered-up and try your best to keep it that way. Paying full price for it would've been less justified. Perhaps fitting, since the game would've made a decent rental. Indeed, my cartridge has a "VOID" imprint on the back from an old sticker. Nintendo Power was typically uninterested in space shooters, so I didn't let that stop me from picking up a copy when a local video rental store liquidated their SNES stock. There was a short review in Nintendo Power magazine that had a screenshot of the first boss, a giant frilled-lizard creature (also depicted on the box art), that I thought looked really cool, but the review was less than favorable. I'll admit that I knew little about it when I originally bought it. Bosses include giant ships that could easily pass for Gradius Cores, wall bosses that block further progress, and the final boss, a bio-computer called "ORN", that looks and plays out similarly to Bacterian and the Bydo Core.īecause of this strangely blatant mimicry, Thunder Spirits feels more like a game that's for players who can't get enough of the space shooter genre and will feel comfortable with its familiarities than it is a definitive game of its own. Even some of the enemies are nearly identical, such as the fiery phoenixes and the "Mill", a blue ball that appears out of the background and converges on the player's ship, just like the Zubs in Gradius. There are times it felt like I took a wrong turn and ended up in Bacterian's Mechanical Base or the solar flare stage in Life Force. The weapons, speed-up system, and even the stage designs will remind SNES players in particular of Gradius III and Super R-Type. The earlier Thunder Force series titles had overhead stages, but in a move heavily inspired by Konami's Gradius and Irem's R-Type series, Technosoft went all sidescrolling this time. What I can say is Thunder Spirits is certainly not the worst space shooter I've ever played and not even the worst on the Super NES, but doesn't stand out amongst its better contemporaries. I recognized some of the music from Thunder Force III, but can tell you little else about how they compare to one another. I have never played the arcade game and probably played less than an hour of the Genesis title. The general consensus on Technosoft's Thunder Spirits is that it's a mediocre port of the arcade game it's based on, Thunder Force AC, and is inferior to its Sega Genesis counterpart, Thunder Force III.
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