With a name like Gunstar Heroes, it is hard not to at least get a sense of the goings-on in this Wii Virtual Console tribute to a Genesis classic. It follows "Gunstar Red" (and Gunstar Blue if you have a friend with whom to play) on a quest to retrieve the Mystical Gems stolen by the evil Colonel Red and his cronies. In other words, this is your standard story of heroes using guns to vanquish evil. It provides some mildly interesting context for your actions, but little else. Gunstar Heroes' strength is not its story, it is the gameplay.
When you start a game in Gunstar Heroes, you are taken to a screen that allows you to choose your starting weapon. You will have a choice between two shooting styles, one that allows you to walk and shoot, the other that allows you 8-way control of your weapon while standing. The weapon choices seem pretty meager at first, but when the Gunstars grab other weapons in the course of their adventure, they can combine them in different ways to get different weapons -- everything from flames you can move about the screen for several seconds at a time to a laser sword -- and they all have their own upsides and downsides, but chances are you will find a personal favourite, and use it for the majority of the game. Of course, the Gunstars are talented beyond the mutually dependent abilities to run and gun, they are quite acrobatic. The Gunstars can hang-drop of cliffs, shimmy along poles, wall jump, throw one another as well as their enemies, and kick slide; and even the second half of the wall jump is an attack! And in terms of co-operative gameplay, this is the best there is for the Virtual Console at the moment. Of course, there is more to how a video game plays than how the characters play; the enemies play a huge role.
And in Gunstar Heroes, the grunt enemies are pretty forgettable, they have your standard array of attacks to avoid, but a large number are thrown at you at once. It makes the gameplay frantic and intense. However, the bosses are the stars of the show. One boss in particular has many different forms it cycles through, and each boss and mini-boss has different sets and sequences of attacks to keep players from the lethargic practice of pattern recognition and breaking that bogs down many other side-scrolling shooters. The bosses' patterns break and shift quite often, and for the most part, they challenge (and occasionally frustrate) even the most experienced Metal Sluggers or Contra Killers. However, the game is beatable; especially on the Wii.
The Wii automatically saves state whenever you quit (to menu, not turn off) any Virtual Console game. In Gunstar Heroes, a game without saves or passwords but unlimited continues, this feature waters the game down. However, it is this writer's opinion that an absence of save or password features in games made in the last 15 years is an artificial way of increasing difficulty, and as a result of the Wii functionality, Gunstar Heroes is exposed as a short game, even for an old-school shooter. Having said all this, the content that is there is eminently enjoyable and challenging, so much so that it is worth playing multiple times.
A big part of the total package, even of Genesis-era games, is the audio-visual experience. Gunstar Heroes features imaginative character design, a lively animation style, with a fairly consistent frame rate, however; epileptics should NOT play this game. It features bright, flashing colours and rapid movement; it can give some people headaches, and some others will get far more severe reactions. This is a warning people need to take seriously.
The music, when it rises above the din of gunfire and death, has its moments; but does not match the best the era or the genre has to offer. It does the job and little more. The aforementioned sound effects also represent the standard Genesis audio fare.
As a whole, Gunstar Heroes is a perfect Genesis port for the Wii Virtual Console and is a fun and affordable co-operative game. If you are waiting for the Contras to come, this game can satiate you and a friend until the day that sweet bounty comes.
***Post-Contra-Release Notes***
Gunstar Heroes is better than all Contra games on the Virtual Console.
