Strider Hiryu [Model NAPR-1041]

Strider Hiryu for PC-Engine CD was released on September 22, 1994 in Japan.

There has been a lot of drama surrounding the release of this PC-Engine port of Strider Hiryu. You may have noticed that it was released in 1994 - five years after the original arcade game, and four years after the Sega Mega Drive version. So what happened? It seems that original work began on a Super Grafx HuCard version in 1990 - but, apparently, the failure of the system forced NEC Avenue to make a CD-ROM version instead (it seems that the choice of the Arcade Card came later). Although the incredible delay is explainable, various pictures appeared in Japanese magazines around 1990 arguably 'showing' images of the game in action. And indeed, the images do show differences with the original arcade game (they could be pictures taken from an arcade beta version though). In any case, this was enough to start a rumor mill among PC-Engine fans, and this subject remains a topic of controversy, still to this day.

Interestingly, this PC-Engine port was made by the Japanese developer Dice Creative. Their website states that the company was created in response to a request for third party outsourcing by Satoru Iwata (Manager of Development of HAL Laboratory at the time and now president of Nintendo). They first released the gambling game Vegas Stakes/Las Vegas Dream (Super Famicom, 1993) and Strider Hiryu for the PC-Engine followed in 1994. This is rather strange if you take into consideration that Dice only developed 'low-profile' games for Hal Laboratory and Strider was the only PC-Engine game they ever made... How did they end up inheriting NEC Avenue's Strider project? However, all of this partly explains why Strider looks under part compared to other NEC Avenue games...

This PC-Engine port is quite faithful to the original arcade game. But, NEC Avenue (maybe in a way to apologize for the game being delayed) added an exclusive second stage (a desert camp level), as well as new animated cutscenes filling out the story in even more detail and a CD-quality remixed soundtrack. However, the game lost the original parallax scrolling and the stage layout is slightly different in places.