Major Stryker

Back in the shareware days, I used to have a few 2-D shooters like this. Raptor, Zone 66, and of course the one I'm writing about, Major Stryker. It arrived in early 1993 from everyone's favorite producers, Apogee Software. It featured this neat 3-D triple background scrolling thing, some sweet EGA graphics, and awesome digitized sound for us folks with the soundblaster. It starts after World War III, humanity is in turmoil, and some aliens come through a wormhole to take out your civilization. Expect mass frustration, broken keyboards, and everybody in your neighborhood hearing you yell "I'm never playing this game again!"


Gameplay: 8/10
Furiously hard. You control Major Stryker, I guess he's a  remaining member of some elite strike force or something, on a mission to blow up a few alien planets. You can move up, down, left and right on your little 2-D plane of existence, tap ALT to rapidly shoot some missles, hit space to drop a bomb, and more. The powerups do stuff like raise your fire rate, increase the number you can shoot, and shield you. The ship will go down in one hit, unless you have a powerup, which at that point you'll just lose all your neat stuff. There's an angering amount of enemies that are constantly barraging you with their flashy red things, and you're supposed to be able to dodge all this and destroy them all at the same time.  If you don't pick up the first chain of powerups by destroying the first and second wave of enemies in the level, it's going to be pretty tough to get it going from there. That's my experience with it, at least, if you die you might as well restart. In actuality, this sort of challenge is what keeps me playing this game, but -2 points for making me tap ALT so much.

Graphics: 7/10
The game plays pretty well, the levels are pretty cool looking, my only problem is there's just too much stuff going on at once. Extremely hard to concentrate when so much stuff is happening. I had to take away 3 points for that, but otherwise it's colorful, fast, and fun.

Sound: 8/10
The digitized sound is one of the best parts of this game, hearing those explosions and bumpin' the music just fits so well. The tunes are a little lame though, so -2 points. Could have done better but still great.


Overall: 8/10

Major Stryker rocks. It's a really good example of how games of the time had new innovations that we take for granted today. It was 2006 when Apogee made the bold decision to call the game freeware. Come to think of it, I knew this game was ultra hard when I was a kid, but it seems even more difficult now. Maybe you can get somewhere I didn't? Link below secures the download.
ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/freeware/strykerfw.zip