Kouichi-Yotsui
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Moon Diver review: Lunar mayhem
Do you remember Strider? I'm not asking if you have a vague awareness of it or even if you've played it -- do you remember the excitement of its arrival on the Sega Genesis? It was the first game to shove eight megabits of memory into a single console cartridge, a fact loudly proclaimed by an emblem on the box art that screams "8MEGA MEMORY." It featured enemies like a giant centipede made out of people, an evil guy in a robe who (as the story goes) took out five of the seven continents without breaking a sweat, and, of course, giant robot dinosaurs. If you owned a Sega Genesis in 1990, Strider was a Big Damn Deal. 21 years later, it can be said with no great amount of equivocation that the quietly-released Moon Diver is about as far as one can get from a Big Damn Deal. What Moon Diver is, however, is as close to "Strider for the 21st century" as we may ever see. It looks like Strider, it plays like Strider, it even features a production credit from none other than Kouichi Yotsui, Strider's director. While it never explicitly references the 20-and-change-year-old classic, it is quite obviously cut from its cloth. Moon Diver's prime target audience, then, is those who do remember Strider as a Big Damn Deal. %Gallery-117024%
