Starship Hector (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1990 shoot 'em up for the NES, Starship Hector. This video shows two loops of the Normal mode. The second loop, beginning at 22:38, is played as the hero from RoboWarrior, "Bomber King". Starship Hector, or as it was known in Japan, Hector '87 (ヘクター'87), was the centerpiece of the third Hudson All-Japan Carnival Festival, a touring competition hosted by Takahashi Meijin (the real-life Master Higgins) that was conducted from a van painted to look like the Hudson bee. The event was held annually from 1985 to 2000. This was the last Famicom title to headline the festival, but what an awesome game it was to retire the platform on. Like the previous caravan games (Star Force in '85 and Star Soldier in '86), Starship Hector bears the clear influence of Xevious, but it builds on those elements in a lot of fun and devious ways. There are six stages in total, and since the game takes place after the apocalypse, they each take place over the destroyed landscape of a once prosperous Earth culture. The Starship Enterprise Hector has a forward-facing cannon for aerial enemies, as well as a bunker buster that's useful for destroying ground targets and drawing life pellets from dispensers. In the odd-numbered, vertically-scrolling stages, your bombs can be used to unearth secrets. Finding the letters to spell out "Hector" nets you a cool million points, and whenever you expose and destroy a patch of machinery in the ground, the resulting explosion will wipe out any ground-based enemies that happen to be onscreen. In the even-numbered, horizontally-scrolling stages, your bombs travel along the ground until they hit something or fly offscreen. What I love about Starship Hector is that it doesn't rely on a bunch of mechanics to artificially deepen the gameplay. It's built like an arcade game that's aiming to refine and expand upon on the genre's fundamentals. It demands that you pay attention to spacing and hitboxes, and that you can coordinate strings of enemy-specific strategies as the waves bear down on you. There are no gun or ship upgrades, so you can't rely on piercing lasers and spread shots for crowd control, nor are there are any mid-stage checkpoints or continues. Getting hit will momentarily disable your guns, and that, paired with the lack of invincibility frames, prevents you from using your life-bar as a crutch to lazily tank hits. It's difficult but far from impossible. The enemy placements and patterns don't change, and they're satisfying to learn and develop plans for. The game is just twenty minutes long, but it trades length for intensity, and it keeps the pressure on you the entire time. One piece of advice for anyone going into it fresh: get yourself a turbo-fire controller. Hudson began allowing the use of auto-fire pads in their competitions in 1987, and they heavily promoted the "Hector 87" Famicom controller (a rebadged Joycard MkII pad) alongside the game. The manual doesn't mention this, but the game was clearly balanced to be played with one. I don't have a MkII controller, so I used my Hudson Joycard Sansui SSS pad, an updated model of the MkII (with a stereo headphone jack and a volume slider) that was sold in North America. I'd recommend one to anyone who's looking for a quality third-party NES pad. It still sells for reasonable prices ($15-30 USD, typically), it looks and feels a lot like a TurboGrafx-16 controller with its rounded corners, the build quality is excellent, and I like how much thicker and heavier it is than the standard Nintendo controllers. I'm a big fan of Konami and Compile's NES shooters, but I found a lot to love about Starship Hector's back-to-basics approach to design. If you enjoy well-crafted, classically-styled arcade shooters, this is one to check out. The box art is pretty kick ass, too. (And if you're put off by the slowdown and flickering sprites on the NES, you might want to check out Hudson's "Caravan Shooting Collection" for the Super Famicom. It includes an accurate port of Hector '87 that eliminates the original game's performance issues.) _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!