Strider (Arcade/Sega Genesis, 1989/1990)

 

This is the 200th action game I've covered on here. My God. 200. I have a feeling that if I'd grown up as a Sega Genesis kid instead of a SNES kid, this would have been one of my most-liked games. I probably wouldn't have been able to beat the game though. As usual, not sure what I'm getting into here, this is a first-time playthrough of something I've only heard of, on a system that I haven't done enough with.

There's also a stripped-down, scaled-down NES version, but it pales compared to the Arcade and Genesis versions. They can be played on a TV easily enough today with the Capcom Arcade Stadium and Nintendo Switch Online respectively.

Previously, on Marvel vs. Capcom...

Strider Hiryu is another Capcom character, from the titular Strider. One of the more well-liked Genesis platformers. Never got around to that one...maybe I should.

Strider has these awesome blade slashes. One of the best-looking moves in the game.

A related shot of the Gold Tracer weapon in Dark Souls, which leaves a blade-beam as well. Maybe it's a nod to this game? I don't know, it could really be anything, but Fromsoft games do tend to have some interesting nods to other things in them.

Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (coming soon!) has Strider prominently featured on the main menu. Why is his belt way bigger than his body? It looks like a hula hoop, and makes him look like he has a hot little lady-waist. Which I don't think he actually does, so waist-enthusiasts will be disappointed.

Genesis version first up. This cloaked guy is the villain, and he's trying to take over Earth. Judging from the background, he's got a lot of technology at his disposal. Now, Strider must battle through five levels to stop him!

It's the year 2049, and his crusade is starting in Russia. Kinda like the Chimera aliens from Resistance: Fall of Man, the alternate-1951 war story where an alien invasion starts in Russia and spreads from there.

Russia: The land of buildings having nipples. It's no coincidence that the Slime from Dragon Quest looks so much like Russian buildings, considering what a little commie he is.

The bad guys are coat-wearing troopers with gunblades. And mechs, lots of mechs. This is about as easygoing as the game ever gets; after this it immediately inundates you with enemies and projectiles from all directions at all times. It's ridiculous how busy it is.

The big claim to fame that Strider has is the awesome blade slash. It has the same multichromatic tinting that the lasers in Defender for the Atari* has. The lasers I'm always going on about, that need to be seen on a CRT TV to be understood. Well, they got a similar thing going on here and it really stands out as iconic. You can spam this blade slash as fast as you can hammer the button, and it shreds whatever is in range.

* - This is only the case with the Atari 2600 version of Defender. The arcade version (and all the ports of the game) have different lasers in various colors with a "cascade" effect... they are still pretty awesome looking, but completely different from the multichromatic florescent lasers in the 2600 version. Unfortunately those lasers didn't make it into any of the ports. Considering the 2600 version looks archaic and terrible in every other regard compared to the arcade version, it's probably good that they didn't use it for ports of the game. Arcade Defender versus Atari 2600 Defender is like a 4-bit game versus a 1-bit game. ....I should just do a post about Defender. The Atari 2600 needs some sort of representative on here.

Our hero can grab onto walls and ceilings and climb around. He can also grab onto platforms and flip up onto them. Wait a minute, is that...? Is that WWE Champion Cody Rhodes??

That was the first boss, but you barely even know it because slashing-spam has him defeated in mere seconds. Hammering the attack button fast enough makes mincemeat of almost everything, even bosses. His big move during the fight is that he causes fireballs to rain down, during which you can hide under this platform.

Strider has a slide move not unlike Mega Man's slide. It's the best way to get out of the way of incoming enemy moves, and it damages foes if it collides with them. So really, I should be sliding all over the place. Considering this is Capcom, it isn't surprising.

Cody was just a miniboss. The actual first boss is this... centipede robot that wields sickle-blades. Not gonna lie, this thing is kind of awesome-looking. The fight is a real PITA because he takes up so much screen space, though. You can stand on his back (like the serpent minibosses in Mega Man X) and wail on the head from there.

I found this spot high on the wall to be the best place to get wedged-in and slash away, hoping for the best. Bosses have low HP, but with big bosses like this, it isn't low enough to stand and bang it out with them. Need to find a safe-ish spot and go from there.

This random guy looks like if Chairman Mao was played by Sosa's creepy henchman from Scarface.

"You didn't say nothin' about killin' no kids!"

Eurasia? Is this George Orwell's 1984 universe? Is Strider a resident of INGSOC?

Well, the cloaked guy's minions are now actively hunting Strider as he tries to get out of Russia. Level 2 is a snowy mountain area. Getting major Ninja Gaiden vibes from this game, with the between-level cutscenes and the overall aesthetic. This game followed that one by a year so they likely did draw from it.

In a round of tit-for-tat, Ninja Gaiden 3 would kinda copy the sword swing animation from this game for the Super Sword powerup (though scaled way down).

In any case, I fight my way through the snow-lands, and I'm realizing at this point that enemies respawn insanely fast. I can barely hold off the respawns much less make forward progress. It's like trying to pay off a credit card with super high interest rates.

Would it kill this game to just...let up for a second?

Next miniboss is this metal gorilla, one of the better-looking enemies in the game. I hang from the ceiling and wail away. For great justice.

The Genesis run at the game unfortunately comes to an end with the level 2 endboss. This guy flies around and launches projectiles like a maniac, and quite frankly the Genesis controller was causing me a lot of grief by this point. The D-Pad isn't the best, and neither is the button layout. The Genesis version is also kind of ridiculous with the amount of enemies and projectiles onscreen. So I decided to check out the arcade version on Capcom Arcade Stadium, with the AI ferociousness turned down a bit (pretty much a requirement for any arcade game on console).

Well, it definitely looks prettier, and there are more frames of animation, also, it isn't zoomed-in as much as the Genesis version. I'd say the Genesis version easily beats any other console versions of this game and wins out of necessity. In the modern era where you can play the arcade version, just do that.

When you finish a level, the scene freezes with whatever Strider's current frame of animation is. I tried to freeze it on his hilarious midair cartwheel.

Level 3 takes me to a flying ship with all sorts of gun placements on it.

Looks like if you collect health restore items while you're full, you gain more ticks of HP (you start at 3 and can go up to, I think, 6).

This level has a particularly annoying section where the lights keep going out. The amount of projectiles and general debris flying around is pretty wack by this point, and made much worse by the lack of being able to see.

Back to the game, the next boss is an awful fight. It's this big SOL-9000 orb that rotates around a large room. You can stick to all of the walls and run around it at will, and jumping towards it gets you caught in its gravitational pull. It's a great idea for a fight. Problem is, every so often while spinning around it, Strider will just spiral out of control, hit a wall, and take damage. It seems unavoidable, because no matter what I did, I'd always spin out the same way.

Well, I won by getting in close and spamming attacks and getting it ded before it unavoidably spun me into enough walls to kill me.

Level 4 is really short, a forest level with boomerang-throwing cave-women.

You also RIDE DINOSAURS and fight off purple dactyls. Alright, this level is awesome, way more fun than that brutal third level. Why is THIS the short level?

Before the level can even really get going, here's the boss, a gold-plated...dragon-thing. I rapid-fire slashes at the head and take it out before it can do much.

The difficulty of this game is wildly-uneven. It goes from no problem to ultra-difficult and back, some fights take seconds...

We get an EXTREME CLOSE-UP of the bad guy. He looks vaguely familiar. Like Smashing Machine Dwayne The Rock Johnson, combined with Mads Mikkelsen.

Level 5 is the last one, and the hardest by a mile. It's ridiculous how hard this level gets. Most of it takes place over this vaguely Star Wars esque massive spaceship gravity-well. You're upside-down a lot, trying to find any sort of footing over this giant pit. When you jump, you fall upwards, and there's a big pit up there too.

The ridiculousness really kicks into gear when I have to use these spikes as platforms. Can't touch the points of them, and they're converging from all sides, going in all directions. Was this necessary?

Yeah, this part was horrendous. Not pictured are all the deaths trying to get through here without bumping into spikes constantly.

Level 2 was hard, level 3 was really hard, level 5 is stupidly hard. Level 1 and 4 were fine. As a kid, I doubt I would have ever gotten past level 3, and if I did, level 5 would have buried me. I probably would have never cleared it until the advent of emulation. Had to blast the Capcom Arcade Stadium rewind button to get through this.

I finally get through that section and...time over, have to do it again. You get like a minute and a half for every section, and in this level it constantly forces you to proceed slowly and carefully. If it's gonna necessitate careful, perfect platforming, don't have a damn 90 second timer on the player!

The very end has rematches with all of the bosses and some of the minibosses from earlier in the game. I don't remember the mecha-ape having a tyrannosaurus as an accomplice.

"I was in the back" says the T-Rex while lighting up a doobie.

New miniboss fight with a martial arts practicing young lady. Here she is doing Tai-Chi.

She can split into three like Psylocke. This actually makes it easier to rack up hits with rapid sword slashes, especially with the powered-up big blade.

As I take down that first big boss again, have I mentioned the big blade? Yeah, this game has its own "super slash" type powerup that gives the blade a lot of reach. After a little while it reverts back to the normal size slashes. This is why the blade size has been variable throughout the game.

The first big boss is also the last of the boss rush, leading directly to the cloaked villain guy. He cuts a promo, then the battle begins.

Weird fight here, taking place over a pit (just like the rest of this level) and using these vaguely-skeletal pieces of space station as platforms.

I line up and wail on this guy, and he takes a lot more hits than the rest of the bosses. A LOT more. The super sword is a must, and I think it's on one of the outer platforms in case someone gets here without it.

He has these green homing lasers that move faster than Strider does, and you have to basically lead them around hoping to evade them at the last second. If you don't get moving right away and have frame-perfect movements, you probably aren't going to actually avoid them. And good luck actually striking the boss during any of this. One of the more annoying final bosses I've dealt with lately, to cap off a particularly annoying final level.

"Reach for the stars, cause if you don't catch them, at least you'll fall on top of the world."

-Pitbull

"And if you slip, I'm gonna fall on top of your girl! Ah ha ha! Dali."

Man, you were so close to sounding a little profound there for a second, Pitbull. Where the hell have you been, anyway?

Credits have Strider riding around on a whale. I don't know what's goin' on.

Let's see what the NES version looks like:

Oh, we have an intro this time. And it's horrendous, lol.

The striders are the toughest group of people! They execute abduction and instigate things! Uhh, alright. Are we sure they aren't the CIA?

This looks totally different. Gone is the Russian architecture and so forth. They turned it into a really plain, basic game.

Even the signature blade-swing animation is now tiny and scaled-down. Yeah, I think I'm good on this NES version. It's basically adifferent game and much more of a generic NES action game.

So, final thoughts on Strider (the real one, the Genesis and arcade versions)? Didn't like it much at all. Game was WAY too busy and chaotic and didn't have any real precision or finesse to it whatsoever. The controls were somehow simultaneously too loose and too limiting. The blade swings were the best part and really the main thing it has going for it. I know this game has its rabid fans from back in the day, but playing it for the first time here on 2026...it just didn't do much for me.

I think this was the Genesis answer to the Ninja Gaiden series on the NES. However, I enjoyed those games far more. They're more cerebral and require you to think before you act, with everything moving at a steady pace, and each special weapon having very specific situational uses. This game on the other hand just throws the kitchen sink at you while you run around hammering the slashing button as fast as possible. There never seems to be a moment to actually BE cerebral in this game, you don't get to stop and think at any point.

When it comes down to it, this game is everything I tend to not like about Genesis platformers (and arcade platformers, for that matter). Too much going on, just constant enemy spam being thrown at you. The controls are very non-precise, as well, with the jumping being stiff like Sonic, the movement having too much momentum... the list goes on. I got about halfway through the game before I officially shifted from "would have really liked this if I'd been a Genesis kid" to "yeah this reminds me of why I don't like Genesis very much"...

I'm surprised at how much I didn't gel with the Genesis controller here. I love that controller aesthetically, but I had to tap out with it after those first two levels of this game. Yeah, this foray into doing some Genesis on the Switch Online didn't go very well. Need to switch gears here.