Super Stardust 96 is an excellent arcade shoot-em-up that combines addictive gameplay with breath-taking ray-traced and fully animated 3D graphics, digital music and sound effects, to give you the blast feast of your life. Destroy everything in sight and collect weapons and power-ups to help you in your quest. Fight your way through five worlds and four warp gates to reach the end and face Professor Schaumund himself. The game is a non-stop barrage of enemies, explosions, debris and destruction. According to the official game page at Housemarque, Super Stardust was “the first true arcade blaster shoot-em-up for the PC ever” and the game certainly lives up to this claim. Among the many features are: huge and fully animated enemies, realtime glow and transparency effects, digital music and sound effects, and all this in a steady 70 FPS. Too bad this PC version didn’t enjoy as wide distribution as its Amiga cousin, and stateside publisher GameTek did a much poorer job than European publisher Team 17, resulting in the game being literally unknown in the US. Still, here’s your chance to finally try one of the BEST shoot-em-ups ever made for the PC. Two thumbs up, way up! Reviewed by: Underdogs |