SAGAIA – Retro Game A Week Episode 31 –

I picked this game up last week from the awesome game shop, entertainment world in Birmingham. The game seems to be a prequel to the darius games.(Actually while trying to do some research on the game I found out that it is actually Darius 2. Renamed Sagaia for the Master System release.) It still has the series theme of flying space fish, because why not? The graphics are amazing for the master system, compare this to something like the nes and the kind of shooting games we had on that and you can see just how impressive it looks. They even tried to do some fancy background animations which look a bit choppy but still far cooler than just the blackness of space which was so common in the 8-bit era.
The game seems a bit easier than most Darius games, possibly due to some slowdown which seems to affect the game when theres a few too many enemies on the screen.
It’s still really challenging though and took me a long time to get past the first stage! When you do you’re given a choice of which area to advance to.
It’s also available on the Megadrive so it would be interesting to see how much improved that version is.
The music is fantastic and the power ups are fun to use. The controls are just what you’d expect from an old school shooting game, which is to say, fast and responsive. The hit box seems just right although sometimes there can be a few too many enemies on the screen at once and more than a few annoying deaths…