Developer: Game Arts
Publisher: Sega
Released: 1993
While Sega and Nintendo had been battling tooth and nail for control of the video game market in 1993, the big N was about to up the ante. Nintendo had some heavy hitters on the way, not least of which was Star Fox from Argonaut Software. With the power of the Super FX chip, we were playing a fully 3D space shooter on our Super Nintendos! It felt magical!
But Sega CD owners had their own 3D space shooter to get excited about. Game Arts, which was already a fan favourite on the system thanks to the previously-released Lunar, had produced the absolutely stunning Silpheed. Both in screenshots and especially in motion, it kind of blew Star Fox out of the water. Enthusiast magazine GameFan, which was overtly pro-Sega and pro-Sega CD, went berzerk over the game for months. In fact, I’d say that magazine did far more marketing-wise than publisher Sega ever did for Silpheed.
I can’t say that I blame them. Firing up Silpheed for the first time is just breathtaking! It immediately impresses with its amazing 3D backgrounds and ships and a silky-smooth framerate. A far cry from the low-poly ships in Star Fox blinking around the screen at 20 frames per second.
The console war was over!
OK, not really. But boy was Silpheed cool looking! It was a showpiece for the Sega CD. Sure, those impressive backgrounds were just full-motion video, but just interactive enough through creative camera movements and hit detection that you still felt like you were weaving through battleships or surface canyons as you made a strafing run against a level boss.
Game Arts did something brilliant here. The realtime graphics and video backgrounds are tailored to the system’s colour palette so perfectly that they blend seamlessly together during gameplay. What’s more, the pre-rendered CG video in the background was made to look good on the Sega CD, rather than being so high-res and colourful that the limited hardware ripped it to pieces during rendering. Yes, that means Silpheed doesn’t necessarily look as vibrant as it could have, but on the flip side you don’t get any of the artifacting or screen-door speckling that we saw in, say, Microcosm or Sewer Shark or really any other FMV game on the system.
The end result was jaw-dropping stages that found players weaving through canyons on a planet surface, fighting their way through hyperspace, dead in the middle of a massive capital-ship space battle, and more. When I fire this game up today, 30 years after release, I’m still impressed by how it looks.
Silpheed isn’t a typical vertical shooter, the whole thing is presented at an oblique, into-the-screen angle, just like Axelay for the SNES. This drives home the whole “3D” presentation even more, though it’s not necessarily conducive to the best shooter experience. The further your targets are from the front of the screen, the more difficult it is to line them up. And if you decide to fly into the screen, your lateral movement is severely limited. For the most part, you don’t need to do this, though it’s really easy to have a couple repair power-ups floating around up there, tempting you to make a run for them before the next wave of enemies appears.
I had no idea back in 1993 that Silpheed was actually a remake of one of Game Arts’ earliest games. The original Silpheed was released in 1986 for the PC-8801, a very early example of a fully 3D game on Japanese computers. It was so impressive that US PC publishing giant Sierra On-Line licensed it (as well as sidescrolling shooter Thexder) for release in the west.
Silpheed is not a carbon copy of the old game with new graphics, though. The original game repeated a handful of stages over and over again, in true arcade style. Whereas Silpheed on the Sega CD features around a dozen unique levels with a linear story, told through a few cutscenes and the odd voice-overs during gameplay.
Speaking of audio, one thing Silpheed never gets enough credit for is its great soundtrack. It’s not the most impressive to grace a Sega CD game, but the score fits each level just about perfectly, and rocks hard enough that you get pumped to take on each new challenge. I’m not sure why it doesn’t get mentioned more often.
Ultimately, Silpheed was and is a showpiece for the Sega CD hardware. It’s stood the test of time better than the games it competed against. 3D 16-bit titles like Star Fox started showing their age almost immediately, while other full-motion video rail shooters of the era generally failed to sidestep the rendering issues introduced by the hardware they were on. Game Arts showed what a developer could do when it looked to harness the Sega CD’s strengths, rather than muscle through its weaknesses.
