3-D WorldRunner

3-D WorldRunner is a game developed by Squaresoft in 1987. It is also supposedly the first Squaresoft game to be released outside of Japan. You, the WorldRunner, have been asked to help protect planets against the evil Serpentbeasts and their leader Grax. The story is pretty straightforward, like most early console games. For its day the graphics are pretty great. Nice, fairly detailed, solid looking creatures and backgrounds. I have no idea what some of the enemies are supposed to be, but they are aliens so I guess they are allowed to look different. What sets this apart from other similarly-themed games is the perspective. I could almost call this an early over-the-shoulder perspective shooter, as instead of the usual left-to-right platforming action, you play viewing the back of the WorldRunner as he makes his way towards the horizon. Pretty novel at the time I'm sure. The added option of pressing select to turn on a 3-D mode is an added bonus (however, I cannot comment on how successful it is, as I do not own a pair of red & blue 3-D glasses). The music in the game is composed by none other than Nobuo Uematsu, of Final Fantasy fame. Sadly there are only a handful of tunes in the game as far as I can remember: The level music, the boss music, and some little short tunes signifying the start and end of a level, dying etc. That's right, every level has the exact same music. I would have liked a little more variety but the tunes themselves are pretty decent, capturing the atmosphere well. The controls in this game are simple but adequate. Up speeds up the player while down slows him down, left and right move the player to the left and right respectively, B fires his weapon (once you pick it up), and A causes the WorldRunner to jump. The controls are nice and responsive and fluid, giving the game an arcadey feel. Each level follows the same format of dodging enemies and leaping over pits. This is what is most challenging about the game. The longer the jump button is held, the further he jumps and the pits start to come one after another in varying sizes, so mastering how long to hold the jump button is necessary. At the end of every level is a long, segmented boss creature that you destroy piece by piece. Sadly, the only thing that really varies between each level is how the background and the boss looks. Ultimately this makes the game very repetitive. It also gets extremely hard with split second timing crucial to survival. Overall it's a novel idea and the graphics and controls are excellent, but the repetitiveness and rapidly increasing difficulty of the levels lets it down. It is still a good fun game definitely worth playing.