ACA NEOGEO BLAZING STAR

Blazing Star is on the top of all Neo-Geo's shooters. With an intense non-stop bullet frenzy and laser action, a well made variety of ships and hi-score inducing challenge, you'll be in for the space shootout of your life. Also, the music is pure ear candy and puts the shooting ''To the rhythm''. An absolute must for Neo-Geo and Shooting fans.

On the surface, Blazing Star is an inviting and jaunty Shooter with an encouraging off-screen support character (for once), good graphics, cool two-player mode, a unique plot and a lot of ships with variety in attack types, speed, design and even pilots! At its core though is a stupidly brutal Score Attack Mode that at no point enlightens you on how its score multipliers work or why you should even care. Ordinarily, you shouldn't, but herein lies the problem with Blazing Star: while it tempts you to get high scores, it has NO EXTEND SYSTEM or 1UPS connected to your score! Worse yet, the game divides up which ship is allowed to get which item that, in any well-developed Shooter, would be permissible via pick-up icons: a Shield System, Force/Option, Homing Missiles and Bit/Gunners; the only pick-ups you get are Power-Ups, Bonus Points and Angels. As it stands, Blazing Star is a fun SHMUP, it's just got its heart focused on the wrong thing: It's all about the score, not about the smarts.

This is one of the best "bullet-hell" SHMUPS ever made. Bright, colorful graphics and spot-on controls combined with 6 different ships and a variety of playstyle options provide for an incredible gameplay experience. SNK knocked it out of the park with this 1998 classic. A highly recommended game you will want to play over and over again.

great old school 2d shooter

One of the better Neo Geo ACA shmups.