PULSTAR is a shooting game released in 1995. Players play as Kaoru Yamazaki, the lone fighter pilot of the Dino246 and one of the few survivors of the Pulstar attack force founded to save the Solar System from alien invaders. The Dino246 can fight its enemies by either firing barrages of small and r...
PULSTAR is a shooting game released in 1995. Players play as Kaoru Yamazaki, the lone fighter pilot of the Dino246 and one of the few survivors of the Pulstar attack force founded to save the Solar System from alien invaders.
The Dino246 can fight its enemies by either firing barrages of small and rapid blasts which cover a wide area of the battle screen or via charged shots which deliver devastating emissions of energy. Players progress through the levels with a spacecraft, collecting power ups and protecting the spacecraft from destruction. Once a power up is obtained, a small orb appears at the posterior end of the ship. This can be used to deflect or absorb oncoming enemy fire and take out small enemies that run into it.
The buttons can not be reassigned. What's more, the button assignment sheet lies (example the z key fires, not x like the sheet suggests)
The game is also unfriendly to keyboard to controller mapper programs like JoyToKey.
There's other SNK/NeoGeo games on GOG.com with more options and features, so i'm not sure why this one was so badly neglected. No love for shmups?
Symptom:
If you have a high refresh rate monitor the game will sync the fps with the refresh rate.
AMD Radeon Chill won't work to force 60fps.
Workaround:
I downloaded RivaTuner Statistics Server and created a profile for the game.
60 for the frame limit,
On-Screen display rendering mode = Vector 2d
On-Screen Display coordinate space = framebuffer.
Had to do this for all games from DotEmu Snk for them to run normal.
If you have a 60hz monitor then the game will run normal out of the box.
Only applies for high refresh rate monitors.
Awesome game, hopefully this issue gets fixed in the future even though I highly doubt it.
RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE SUPER DIFFICULT HORIZONTAL SHOOT-'EM-UPS OR ARE OKAY TO WITH USING THE INCLUDED SAVE STATE FUNCTIONALITY. This game seems to designed for arcade use and has a lot of kill-the-player design. Granted, you can pass all that with minimum challenge by loading states after you have found those newbie traps and most projectiles can be absorbed endlessly by a shield module, it is not impossibly hard. Beating it "legit", good luck passing stage 2 / 8, even with infinite coins / continues. One thing done slightly wrong can kill your chances of not dying.
If you have played arcade or TurboGraphx-16 version Gradius 3, the difficulty is very similar. It takes a lot of enemy position memorization to a single state. Maybe G3 was slightly more difficult - that first level with fire is insanely difficult. Just being compared to G3 should tell you enough about the situation. Casual players can beat it if they master using the load and save functions.
Not any DotEmu issues with this one, which is strange. Usually there are slowdowns, coupled with input drops and other patience testing. Could be that the data payload is small, who knows. The inputs are somewhat wrong, though all you really need to do in the game is move the ship and press Z to fire. And load-save the state from the menu if you are not Korean.
Shmup fans probably like the level design, the challenge and the bosses (not particularly hard, detailed, a lot of Gradius style snakes). It is hard to come up with things to improve besides the usual "add more stuff." The weapons are pretty cool: a laser ricocheting off the walls, the gun pods you can rotate every 45 degrees and shoot everywhere with and the purple homing missiles that lock onto enemies. That's quite a lot of stuff for an hour-long game. Well, the gameplay is very samy / deja vu, esp. after Gradius ones
Give it a try. It's worth a look. Might not be the best SNK shmup, so look up Blazing Star and others if you just want the best one.
Basically like R-Type, but also its own thing. Made by some of the same people. It's a great game, I've played it a lot and different versions. Unfortunately this is a bare bones port. I'm not rating this game a 3 star based on the game it is, but on the merits of the type of port it is.
There's an audio glitch after the end of each stage in which the celebration music after beating a boss cuts of abrubtly in mid play.
There's no visual or graphics options, only full screen or windowed.
You can't remap the buttons. You can use a controller and it works, but it's also kind of wonky and with my Xbox One controller, it doesn't always register a coin insert unless I fidget with it and restart the game.
Other than that, it's Pulstar. I love the graphics and gameplay. It's a good shooter that will keep you challenged. The music is absolutely fantastic throughout the game.
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Ok, got it
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