Developed/Published by: Housemarque / Sony Computer Entertainment
Released: November 25th, 2008
Completed: 31st May, 2014
Completion: Beat all the planets in arcade mode. Not in one go or anything, mind.
Trophies / Achievements: N/A

I must have bought this bloody forever ago and just never played it. Here’s why I didn’t, I bet: I was sick of twin stick shooters when I bought it, but it’ll have been on sale so I was banking it for a rainy day.

I can honestly remember when the only twin stick shooters for years were Robotron 2084 and Smash TV (well, and Total Carnage, but it’s pish.) Then after Geometry Wars they were bloody everywhere (though wasn’t Mutant Storm before that?) and even though I’d put Robotron 2084 on my desert island disks, I was definitely burned out on them.

The why of that, of course, is that so many of the new wave of twin stick shooters are totally flavourless. Geometry Wars isn’t, but I’d definitely say Mutant Storm is a perfect example of platonic blah. Games where none of the enemies stick in your mind, where there’s just no visual style, where there’s probably some tactics for high scores, but it’s impossible to care enough to try for them.

Can you guess where I’m going with this? Why yes! Super Stardust Portable is one of those games. The one thing that makes Super Stardust HD stand out—the actually neat playing-the-game-on-a-rotating-planet aspect—is totally missing from this because they’ve zoomed the view in (PSP couldn’t handle it, or whatever.) And without that, this game could not be more generic.

Which is a bit odd! Because if you go back and look at the original Stardust and Super Stardust on the Amiga there’s bags of weird Euro-game charm. Actually, they were much more purely Asteroids-inspired; I wonder offhand if they could have made a rotate and shoot-em-up instead of a twin stick title, or if that kind of thing is just too old hat (I’m going to say… yes. But they could maybe have gone the Time Pilot/Luftrausers direction.)

The graphics could be totally bonkers, just look at how it looked on the Amiga! Then look above, and feel yourself falling asleep. Of course, the game is a bit more intense than that, what with all the asteroid bits flying about, the three weapons (each better at different things) and multiplier shenanigans. 

But it’s still boring.

Will I ever play it again? I really can’t see why I would.

Final Thought: There were some cool tunnel shooter bits in Stardust/Super Stardust, too, that are totally missing from any of these later games. I’d so rather have spent a few hours playing one of them rather than this on my Vita, honestly.