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Remember that old Sega arcade Space Harrier? It was and still is a classic 3D shooter. Before it came along, games developers would use scaling to try and make a nice 3D effect. In a home computer the sprites must be made one by one (even the same graphic in different sizes), to get the 3D effect, which resulted in visually poor, ugly and in many cases unplayable video games.

We take a look at Shoulder Blade Overdrive and see if it is a better 3D shoot 'em-up game than those commercial games that tried it back in the day.

I remember the first time I discovered this game. An unknown Japanese user (extremely kind and shy person as most of the Japanese tend to be) was regularly posting very short videos on Twitter, with some kind of basic 8-bit gameplays. "Early MSX game in development", he said. I thought those were just another technical demo that had been going around in the MSX scene, trying to emulate the three-dimensional perspective on an 8-bit computer, like F Zero EX or Rock City.

In most cases, those unfinished games were not very good, in fact, some of them were plain awful. But this was not the case for game developer Nobuaki Washio. He has developed a bunch of cool games for the MSX since the mid 1990's, with his most recent game being Draconic Throne.

The story involves us in a high tech future wars. As a result of a mistake, we fell into an enemy battalion inside of our Iron Suit (a white "Mecha" which looks like the old 1980s Anime giant robots, present in Gundam or Patlabor). From the very beginning of the game, we will be immersed into a non stop 3rd person experience, which is heavily influenced by two loop animations and they will change their colours as we advance through the different Stages: the background one which presents a lot of paving stones, and the sky one with plenty of horizontal lines smartly placed and animated.

There are no more mobile elements on the screen, except some green bushes which will appear all over our journey (harmless), rocks (harmful), and barricades (deadly). We can move on the ground, and also in the air. To shoot at our rivals, we have a crosshair to settle on our targets. When we're playing the game, we see four indicators on the HUD: Our score, the loop, the area and number of kills. The enemy's army has a lot of different vehicles ready to kick our ass; like tanks, choppers, planes and rocket launchers and don't forget they have big bosses to defeat! All of them have specific movements, and specific bullets too, because of the right AI implementation in every enemy.

Shoulder Blade: Overdrive gameplay is all about running, sliding, jumping and shooting in very much the same vein as the excellent Space Harrier 3D world.

For me the game rocks! Shoulder Blade Overdrive is a very fast game, a fact that the majority of the early computers users are not used to. It's amazing how cool it is to shoot at successive waves of enemies while our Mecha robot moves all over the screen (in a very similar manner to the F-14 fighter jet sprite used in the game After Burner).

The sprites are coloured nicely. The animation is good and everything fits together quite well against the perspective background. I like the sound effects from the lazer beams and the explosions.

The Boss theme can be quite funny to listen to while you keep on fighting against them. The game comes with several extras which make the game more valuable, like the Intro animation of the title (it reminded me of Afterburner 2). The packaging is excellent, including a cool cover illustration by the great artist "Sirelion". The manual is of high quality, making the presentation feel quite professional.

The sprites are not externally outlined; and sometimes, under their low resolution in my opinion this is not the best way to be displayed on the screen in this aspect, I think Grey Wolf from Oniric Factor is much more attractive - in graphic terms.

While I liked some music mentioned above, the rest of the music, however, is not great to listen to, it consists of a monotonous set of piano notes. At times it makes the game feel and sound chaotic and confusing.

Despite some of my dislikes, Shoulder Blade Overdrive is a tremendous effort. It captures the 3D effect shown in arcade games quite well. If this game was made on a Sega Master System perhaps the sprites could be displayed on a higher resolution, or on a wider colour palette.

Regardless, Shoulder Blade Overdrive means good news to the MSX homebrew games scene. I feel it has improved the 3D offerings available on the MSX/MSX 2 machines. It is quite a brave decision by Nobuaki Washio to make such a game and he has done such a great job, you will love playing it as much as I have!