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Game info |
|  | Starglider |  | Genre | Sci-Fi Sim | Developer | Argonaut Software | Publisher | Rainbird Software | Released | 1986 | Rating
 | Graphics: | 7.0 | Sound: | 7.0 | Gameplay: | 8.0 | Overall: | 7.0 |
| Reviewed by | ndial | Inspired by Jez San's affection for the 1983 Atari arcade Star Wars, Starglider was a real innovative game for its era, running in 3D. Like most games from Rainbird, Starglider was launched complete with an excellent novella in which the game relies heavily on its storyline. The game was released for the 16bit Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIGS, Apple Macintosh, PC (MS-DOS) and the 8bit Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 home computers. |
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Review |
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STORY / GAMEPLAY
Your mission is to glide across the surface an imaginary planet called Novenia, destroying as many aliens and spacecrafts as possible. Each alien form has different value ranging from 50 points for a small drone, to 7.500 points for a Starglider. Each time you gain 10.000 points you are transferred to a new and more complicated level. You control AGAV (Airborne Ground Attack Vehicle) from a first person perspective. The panel allows monitoring critical particulars of your vehicle (such as the scanner, the energy level, the shield meter, the laser cells status, the altitude and the velocity indicator). The main difficulty encountered is refueling energy since this can be done by gliding between two energy towers, at a very low altitude. Repair Silos (represented by rotating wedge-like structures) are also available in order to restock your shields and guns. Your firepower is a set of laser guns and a limited number of missiles. Once you fire a missile your mouse controls this very missile(!), and you must therefore focus on pin-pointing the adversary. Targets vary from Stargliders to ground Walkers (taken from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi!) and Strompers. GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics on DOS are good. Due to the game's age, DOS version supports CGA and EGA graphics hardware only, running in 4 and 16 colors respectively. The cockpit is nicely designed and shows several animated touches on the indicators. The enemy sprites and other objects are made of 3D vectors and they move fast on screen. The game runs fast, as fast as the Amiga version and faster than the ST version, even when too many polygons occupy the screen. The sound on DOS is adequate with some, rather noisy, sound effects.
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Screenshots |
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Comparable platforms |
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Hardware information |
| PC (ms-dos based) CPU: Various processors from Intel,AMD, Cyrix, varying from 4.77Mhz (Intel 8088) to 200Mhz (Pentium MMX) and up to 1995 (available on this site) MEMORY: 640Kb to 32MB RAM (typical up to 1996) GRAPHICS: VGA standard palette has 256 colors and supports: 640x480 (16 colors or monochrome), 640x350 in 16 colors (EGA compatability mode), 320x200 (16 or 256 colors). Later models (SVGA) featured 18bit color palette (262,144-color) or 24bit (16Milion colors), various graphics chips supporting hardware acceleration mainly for 3D-based graphics routines. SOUND: 8 to 16 bit sound cards: Ad-Lib featuring Yamaha YMF262 supporting FM synthesis and (OPL3) and 12-bit digital PCM stereo, Sound Blaster and compatibles supporting Dynamic Wavetable Synthesis, 16-bit CD-quality digital audio sampling, internal memory up to 4MB audio channels varying from 8 to 64! etc. Other notable sound hardware is the release of Gravis Ultrasound with outstanding features!
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 | CGA: 16-color palette (4 on-screen) |  | EGA: 64-color palette (16 on-screen) |  | VGA: 256-color palette (256 on-screen) | |
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