Super Thunder Blade is an early fixed-perpective third-person shooter from Sega, where you control a helicopter. The original Thunder Blade came out in Arcades in 1987 and was a game that used real-time scaling and would make you sit in cockpit, similar to Space Harrier. Super Thunder Blade is a special port of a game by Sega of Japan, that was one of the two launch titles for Sega Mega Drive in Japan, along with Space Harrier 2, and came along into US in 1989, having 4 Megabit of ROM. This one pretty much cuts all the non-boss top-down action scenes.
Thunder Blade also had other ports, for Master System and TurboGrapx-16 (you can call it by japanese name, PC Engine, but bleh). They had varying degree of quality, but at least kept the top-down scenes.
The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version.
Now, technical part about Sega's emulation here:
The Sega Classic games that you purchase on Steam count as DLCs for "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics" game that should appear in your library.
It has Bedroom HUB which is the one with many features yet lags for many and Simply Launcher which lacks Workshop and Online but at least it works just fine for everybody.
However, Simple Launcher has it's fair share of glitches as well. It can crash. And it does the second time you go to main menu, so always quit after saving there so it doesn't crash when you want to save next time!
Emulation itself, mostly sound, isn't that good but it does it's job. Also, yes, emulator supports quick saves.
As alternative, you can use external emulator to run games that you purchased. Sega kindly placed in all games that you purchased in "uncompressed ROMs" folder that program itself doesn't use, just change file extension to ".bin" or so. The file for this one being "STHUNDER_W.68K".
I also demand you to read digital manual of this game first. You can find it here on store page or go to "manuals" folder of game root and open "STB_PC_MG_EFIGS_US_150ppi.pdf".
So, right to game. If you read manual then you will see that it tries to justify itself as sequel. Your Thunder Blade helicopter got rearmed into Super Thunder Blade and now you are once again rocking it out against the renegate troops, moving to blow up their East base basement, stopping them from dominating the free world. Armed with 20mm Gattling Gun and AATM missiles, it's time for you to beat the same 4 stages which are strangely too similar to make it a sequel. Or, rather, it's just a port, mkay. And yep, arcade action, no saving. Not even for high score. I don't even know why those 16-bit ports bothered with them if they never saved.
So, what makes it "Super"? The game that is.
Well, according to Sega, "Super" stands for "cut the half content out".
Thunder Blade had three parts of stage: Top-down action, behind-the-view action and top-down boss. Super Thunder Blade throws Top-down action out and replaces it with another behind-the-view action. It does try to give something back by providing short mini-bosses, but that's not enough. The nice variety isn't there anymore.
Be happy that they never designed hardware for SNES.
Before you get to play the game, you got options menu. Difficulty changes only the speed of projectile that enemies shoot, which barely impacts the game, as in in this you avoid everything by circle motion. It actually might be easier to be on Hard due to exploit. You got the usual sound test here. Then there is control, which you can reserve, which impacts where helicopter goes when you press up or down. The thing is, it's already reserved, and as it's fixed-perspective shooter, not flying sim, you should totally select "reverse" to undo it. Then there are players option which is amount of lives. Plus usual sound test.
Also, when you lose all the lives during your playthrough, a new continue option will pop up at main menu. It starts you off in stage where you got game over. You have three of those continues, so try your hardest.
Maybe one day you will see past the stage 2, who knows.
And yep, the game is quite difficult. Sure the first level will pass by quickly. Even the third level, which is also the only different one from arcade, as it's nothing but sea with warships, is easy enough. But the second level will frustrate most of players as it involves obstacles to avoid. Entrances into caves, stalagmites, rocks, trees. You actually get the ability to air brake, which you should use heavily, as it's the thing that adds more or less additional control and depth over Space Harrier, while trying not to stay in front of enemy for too long as you are likely to get shot despite doing circle motion. And all of that obstacle avoiding wouldn't be so bad if only the graphics weren't so jerky.
And yep, graphics. I really don't know why they decided to put two arcade ports of games that used real-time scaling as launch titles. Some game magazines actually belived that Sega Mega Drive will have ability to do hardware sprites scaling just like arcades. But in the end, it didn't really. And to me, this launch game is all like saying "look at me, Sega Mega Drive can't do scaling and can't do full arcade ports due to top-down being cutted down". And yea, they still tried to keep the scaling part by having pre-made animation for each zoom level, but unlike the simpler and more fun Space Harrier 2, it's for some reason is moving extremely jerky.
And I mean, look at horizontal pipes level 4 that you have to avoid. They not only seemingly change shape by increasing "dividers" as they get closer (by repeating tiles of background) but they jump around vertically slightly as well. I am sure that some people crashed their Super Thunder Blade helichoppa because of that.
That, and the second and fourth stages are still harder than I remember in arcades, for some reason. Probably because can't change speed of helicopter either. Only brake. And tanks can shoot through the obstacles while you can't. That's cheap, alright! Not to mentioning that helicopter is very slow to move around the screen, sluggish control.
Oh, and it still has boss battles. I really don't like them. You can only move horizontally, while your helicopter moves at same slow speed. You can still air brake though and it will start to sloooowly move you backward. But it's not really useful outside of last stage. And it's easy enough to just fly through the big fortress bosses, luckying out on projectiles missing you easily. Still feels too limiting to enjoy. Don't really feel as huge or moving either, due to much more primitive graphics.
At least music is more or less fancy. Minus the sound effects, because those ones are just plain annoying and easily will drown out music tracks. Ouch!
Overall, this one shooter and arcade port was released too early. The scaling are too jerky that it negatively impacts gameplay, being confined in 4 Megabit cartridge. And the fact that they cut normal top-down sections in this one is just shameful. Especially when seeing that Turbographx-16, sorta rival, had them just fine.
Not even the fact that it has panda emote characters for high score input can save it, even if it can provide fun occasionally.
